Balkan Beats: Playing a new tune, from Japan to Istanbul

It was November 2015 and the Japanese crowd at Robert Soko’s music-fuelled party in Tokyo was pumped as they grooved to rousing rhythms played by the Bosnian DJ. 

Soko was quite familiar with the Japanese party crowd– they have been attending his parties in Europe–and found them very lively and very grateful.

They loved Balkan music though he had a sense that they didn’t quite know what it was all about. “They mostly focused on the rhythm and they loved going crazy,” says Soko. “They also had a weird way of dealing with me as some kind of pop-star DJ idol; signing a CD for them was a special moment.”

Then all of a sudden, something inexplicable happened. As the crowd gradually worked itself into a dance floor frenzy, images of Hitler and Mussolini and jackbooted fascists marching in unison at the Nuremberg rallies were projected on the wall over the DJ console. 

Soko was taken aback but not exactly shocked. 

“What did these (the photos) have to do with Balkan music?” Soko had to ask himself. “It was just another illustration for me of how weird the Japanese actually perceived us Europeans and history in general.” 

The years between 2005 and 2012 are generally perceived to be the peak of the Balkan hype – when club-goers in Europe (and America, to some extent) flocked to Balkan parties to dance their cares away to upbeat, brass-laden club tracks reworked with heavy dollops of electronica, bass and break-beats. 

While the trend has been on the wane for some years now in Europe, the one place where it still seems to have mileage left in it is, curiously, Japan, a country with no history of immigration from the Balkans, and where the very idea of Roma community– central to the notion of European Balkan parties – is entirely foreign.

Bosnian DJ and Berlin resident, Robert Soko is sometimes referred to as the ‘Godfather of Balkan Beats’. Soko left his steel-mill hometown of Zenica, in central Bosnia, shortly before the outbreak of the war in Yugoslavia and in 1993 started DJing Yugo-nostalgic parties for a loose diasporic group of Balkanites at a punk club in Berlin’s alternative Kreuzberg district. 

Although there is to this day a great deal of infighting among warring factions of DJs and musicians about who was first and who influenced whom, it’s fairly clear that Soko’s parties inspired a whole array of East European post-communist club-nights, from star-author, Wladimir Kaminer’s Russendisko parties in Berlin to Balkan pop-star Shantel’s Bukovina Club events in Frankfurt am Main.

Gradually Soko started making note of Serbian movies made by Emir Kusturica. But it was his introduction to the music of fellow Bosnian Goran Bregovic that forced Soko to reevaluate the music he had grown up with in Bosnia, but had never really taken heed of.

“I was familiar with the Oriental music of Muharem Serbezovski etc., but I didn’t pay much attention growing up,” says Soko. “It took Bregovic to reveal to me the magic of this music.”

Soko would eventually travel the world, spinning Balkan music and spreading balkanizacija (Balkanisation) and ciganizacija (Gypsification) from Hollywood to Managua, Amsterdam to Cape Town, sparking a club trend called ‘Balkan Beats’ , a blend of Balkan ethno sounds with electronica. 

Soko even ended up trademarking the Balkan Beats label. Eventually  Soko was invited to Japan by fellow Balkan Beats DJ Tagada (Paris) and Cyril Coppini, a Japanophile Frenchman, who has been living in Japan since 1996, and who founded Balkan Beats Tokyo.

“As much as some of them love it, the Japanese don’t really get the Balkans,” says Coppini. “I think that for them the Balkans are just another faraway galaxy. As for a while now, there was a little fashion with cumbia. It’s like, okay, cumbia is from South America and Balkan is from the European East, you know, and rock & roll is from America.”

Interestingly, many Japanese Balkanophiles appear to be coming from a fledgling Arabic belly-dancing scene in Tokyo and Osaka and other big Japanese cities.

German Popov, a Ukrainian musician who performs under the stage name Our Man From Odessa (OMFO), says Japanese people take Western cultural expressions to a new level. 

"Everything that you can find in the West you can find here in Japan, in hyper form. I know some people here who are masters of some traditional  Oriental instruments like kanun, oud. Also belly-dance is very popular, and there are a lot of people involved with belly dance. It’s been popular for many years by the way," says Popov. 

“There were a lot of people into belly-dancing coming to our parties,” says Chiku Yutaka, a Japanese Balkan DJ who helped found Balkan Beats Tokyo. Extremely fashion conscious, a Tokyo trend-setter in his own way, he was largely responsible for pulling in a hip crowd for the Japanese Balkan parties.

“Students were going to belly-dancing schools. I myself performed at a belly-dancing festival this summer in Yoyogi park, a big park in Tokyo. What’s the connection between belly dancing and Balkan music? There’s a definite connection. But the people who like this stuff are a distinct minority in Japan, and there is not much information available on this subject. So that’s why they come to my parties; they are just curious.” 

Curious, but nevertheless with their own unique take on Balkan music, is how Soko views the Japanese audience.

“As a DJ you see your crowd, you feel it, and to some extent you read it as a book,” says Soko. “And reading the Japanese book, the Japanese crowd, I’ve noticed that they are a little bit ‘dishonest’, they are goofing around a little bit. I mean, they all jump, it’s all good. But somehow I don’t have them on the frequency I have other crowds in Europe.” 

One of the things that separates Balkan parties in Japan from the European parties is the age factor. In Europe the style started out appealing to a twenty-something crowd, but with time, as the DJs aged  (Soko is 52), so did the audience, and today it is not uncommon to see people in their forties and even fifties attending Soko’s events.

In Japan, however, music appeals to a decidedly young audience.

“In Japan, when you reach your mid-thirties, say thirty-five,  you don’t go to clubs … especially if you get married and have kids,” says Coppini. “This is also a very big, big difference between Europe, I guess. I mean, I saw in Berlin, when I came to DJ with Robert, of course there were young people. But there were people, also like us. Which is something you will never see in Japan in a club. 

“In Japan it has to be cool. It has to be quick if you want to catch this audience right now. . Because the audience you get now in their twenties and even late twenties, you will lose them in three, four or five years…”

Shingo Matsuda is a kanun player from Japan, a musician  who can be found busking in Berlin and also playing in various Arab, Turkish and Balkan groups  in the city.

Matsuda has been living in Berlin since March 2017, playing his kanun for eight years in Japan before he came here. He picked up the kanun in Japan on the suggestion of a friend after expressing an interest in Arabic music.

For those who don’t know, a kanun is a large zither with a thin trapezoidal soundboard that is famous for its unique melodramatic sound. It is often found in Turkish classical music ensembles. That someone from Japan should take it up is unusual.

I had heard various stories about the origins of the kanun, and according to one legend, its the source could be traced to China and to Japan, where they have a similar zither-like instrument called the koto, and it was this far-eastern provenance that I felt accounted for Shingo‘s interest in the instrument.

“This is incorrect,” says Matsuda. “The kanun has its roots in ancient Persia. Furthermore it was my interest in all things Arabic, in addition to my fascination with ethnic instruments that led me to pick up the kanun.”

Matsuda’s quest for mastery of the kanun led him to Cairo, Tunisia, Greece and Istanbul - a city which he has been to seven times. While in Istanbul, Matsuda went to concerts and attended seminars and workshops. He met masters of the kanun like Goksel Baktagir. Ultimately, it was in Istanbul that Matsuda wanted to settle down  for a stint, but visa problems made this dream untenable — and so he came to Berlin on a working travel visa.

These days, Matsuda can often be seen playing in various Berlin-Balkan-Oriental musical constellations throughout the city.

In talking to him one day after one of his performances it dawned on me that Matsuda had  another name in addition to Shingo — Ali. And so I asked him about it. “You’re not Muslim, by any chance?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “You see, I have adopted Islam.”

“Mashallah!” I said.