Balkan Electro: Origins and Branches

When electro was born out of the decline of disco in the late 70′s, it would have been hard to predict that it would, decades later, find a new bed-fellow in the mountain folk music of South-Eastern Europe. The truth is that electro has always been open to incorporate sounds from other styles of music and has sprouted innumerable branches, Balkan electro being one of the most energetic and vivacious of the lot.

It all started many years ago in the south-east of Europe where a melange of music coming from various cultures gave birth to a genre that distinguished itself by the very festivity of its soul. Balkan music, meaning “music from the mountains” in old-Turkish, brought together various elements from Greece with instruments and melodies from as far back as in the Byzantine period and the Ottoman Empire. An expanding yet isolated culture known as ‘Balkan’ was emerging in the mountains that connect the north of Greece with western Turkey in one direction and as far as the Alps in the other.

Clip from “Ko to tamo peva” ["Who's That Singing Over There?"] A Film by Slobodan Sijan, 1980

Taking us forward to the present day, a new rush of musical trends have been emerging from the underground scenes across the region. That is not to say that this hasn’t been happening for generations, it has purely been aided and accelerated by the explosion of trans-global communication facilitated by the development of the internet. A rapid increase in blogs and file-sharing has unearthed styles of music which would previously have been buried in the unknown. The result, the universal accessibility of traditional and regional musics. Not to mention the producers and musicians who began drawing inspiration from this vast pool, exploiting and blending musical genres which may have never developed in previous years.

Nøze – “You Have to dance”

Balkan electro is a perfect example of how a link between traditional and inaccessible folk music and modern urban beats can open up. Many artists have followed the trend and it has now become very common to hear Cumbias mixed with dubstep or Angolan rhythms mixed with techno, as seen in Kuduro.

Kuduro Tchiriri

The to and fro of influences via the internet reflects how humanity is reaching a point were very little remains unseen or untold. The same can be said for music, and in this case Balkan music which has been mixed with almost every genre; Balkan electro, Balkan Hip-hop (i.e. Balkan Hot Steppers), Balkan Jazz (i.e. Slavic Soul Party),and Balkan Reggae (i.e. Dub Inc). Or how about this from M’siou Rigolitch‬: a bizarre mixture of Balkan with AC/DC and Queen‪.

There are also close familiarities between Balkan music and other folk music from distant cultures that were not digitally transferred. Please judge for yourself:

Papayera de Medellín – Colombia

What is really significant about the global expansion of Balkan music since its marriage to electro is that the origins of this culture, brought up in the peaks of rural Eastern Europe, has seen its popularity explode making it now a main dish of parties around the globe. Who knows what other genres will develop out of Balkan electro in the future.

Illustration by Harmony Pillon.