Music performance by the French duo OD Bongo in KRAK at the opening of Pierre Courtin Collection exhibition. (22. April 2022.)

OD Bongo is a music duo from France whose musical performances build a progressive sound landscape. Combining techno, dub, noise and industrial rhythms, the audience has the opportunity to immerse themselves in the wild, releasing bass.

OD BONGO Live At KRAK Centar (22.04.2022.)

Onaj Dječak (English: That boy / Edin Džambić) is certainly an exceptional, intriguing and unusual phenomenon on the domestic and regional music scene. He is known for his inexhaustible creativity which turns every thought into songs, and these songs are a deconstruction of everything that is known, stylistically unburdened and value-free post-rock music with traces of his own history and experience of a child of the post-war Balkans. Onaj Dječak's music includes sarcasm, gloomy in-your-face comments on social and political events, witty jokes painted with very specific Bosnian humor, but also intimate musical recordings.

Edin Džambić was born in Tuzla and has been living in Zagreb since 2014. He started his music career in 2009 in Brčko, under the stage name Dječak iz vode (English: The boy from the water). This stage name originated as a memory of Džambić's childhood – he grew up on Modračko Lake and on the banks of the Spreča River, and ideas for his first songs come from this period. He released nine albums under this stage name, including Srce, muda and Pez bombone in 2011 (English: Heart, Balls and Pez Candies) and Pamučni svijet in 2012 (English: Cotton World). However, the media and music critics all too often associated his work with Milan Mladenović and the band EKV, although Džambić never drew inspiration from rock music and culture, so eventually, in 2017, he decided to change the name to Onaj Dječak. Under this stage name he released the albums Začarano selo (English: Enchanted Village) and Halal Kahlo in 2019, as well as Često metafora in 2020 (English: Often a Metaphor).

He has no managers or PR experts – he builds his career through online platforms available to his wider audience, and his wife, Ljubica Andjelković Džambić, also helps him professionally. In his creative process, Džambić is not a slave to the established musical forms – there are songs in his repertoire which last only 2-3 minutes, but there are also songs that last 10 minutes. In his songs he tells stories, some lasting longer and some shorter. The chorus is more a coincidence than a rule, and he understands language very freely, so when there is no word which covers the desired meaning, he creates it himself.

Throughout his long career, Džambić has released over three hundred songs. He does not consider himself an activist, but through his music he tries to bring attention to the problems he notices around him, and writes and sings about wars and the political and historical context that reflects on the quality of life. For him, music is a channel through which he contemplates the world around him and the system in which he lives, and a means through which he expresses his views on the world. He is aware that he has no real power or ability to change everything that is wrong in the world, but hopes that his songs and lyrics will encourage other people to think and to take joint action that will lead to changes in society.

ONAJ DJEČAK Live At KRAK Centar (02.07.2022.)

Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK (Hamze Hume Street, Bihać) 
Music performance: Friday, December 24, 2021 at 7 pm



Music performance by Mirsad Fajković Febbo and Igor Reljić Hybrid Mantra is the result of their years-long creative collaboration in which spiritual maturation takes the central place. Spirituality and its technology are the backbone of the performance, which in turn is based on research within quiet and loud environments. From the perspective of a conventional understanding of music, it is a sound experiment based on conversations about spirituality, from which it flows into a sound composition united by overlapping simple sound matrices and various interventions. The authors like to say that "these experiences are related to spirituality and conversations that have turned into sound."

Using digital matrices, various samples, voice and other unconventional instruments and objects that produce sound, combinations are created which test an expanded platform of vibration and frequency capabilities. Of course, in the context of spirituality, sound has an almost healing role and as such, its harmonization affects the "frequency" of internal organs and the entire mental system. Hybrid Mantra project also tests distinctiveness of the range between musical and non-musical sound, where artists flirt very consciously and with error as one of the backbones of expressive language. The performance itself, whether private or public, is based on experience and could possibly serve as a metaphor for the practice of entering and leaving a certain space. This type of sound production uses music and music-making strategies but in practice does not belong to the listenable mainstream music. Therefore, Hybrid Mantra is an introverted act of making music, and its presentation to the public is an act of creative subversion.

The performance at KRAK has been expanded with a moving digital image which serves as a catalyst for the authors' creative sensibility. The video projections, as a "window to the world", open the view to very familiar things, giving them a sublime character. The combination of image and sound wants to introduce the audience to a unique space of sensory experience and transform KRAK into a place of closeness and connection. This is their first public joint performance and introduction to the local audience.

Hybrid Mantra Live At KRAK Centar (24.12.2021.)

Abandoned premises of the former Kombiteks administrative building
Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK (Hamze Hume Street, Bihać) 
Concert: Saturday, September 3, 2022, at 9 pm

The performance of the Sarajevo-based music duo Basheskia & Edward EQ at the premises of former administrative building of Kombiteks textile factory is an attempt to aesthetically revitalize the abandoned industrial places through the sound poetics of electronic music. With almost two decades of presence on the stage, Basheskia & Edward EQ are considered pioneers of electronic music in Bosnia and Herzegovina and artists who affirmed its different direction. Two different artistic sensibilities – a drummer and an opera singer, gained experience through club gigs, collaboration with a number of other bands and work on numerous plays and films. Their recent album Seven Lessons with Mehmed Begić is the result of collaboration with the aforementioned poet and a sort of ambient marker of an individual's thoughtfulness in today's turmoil. The concert in the ruins of Kombiteks aims to revive its abandoned space at least for a moment, but also to bring attention to the spatial values of the former industrial heritage.

In their performances, Basheskia & Edward EQ merge live instrument performances – drums, guitars, synthesizers – with gentle recitals and opera voices, in English, Latin or Italian. The duo very skillfully includes sequences and rhythms, as well as abundant bass moments, thus forming electro-, rock- and trip-hop-arrangements enriched with widely placed epic forms. The Bihać performance is adapted to the spatial circumstances of the concert performance at the ruined premises of Kombiteks.

Basheskia & Edward EQ (Nedim Zlatar and Leonardo Šarić) are music producers who have so far released two albums for Gramofon (Sarajevo), as well as several remixes and compilations. They collaborated with the bands Vuneny, Sikter and Validna Legitimacija.

The concert organized by KRAK Center will be enriched by the participation of Sarajevo DJ Zlijay (Zlatko Duraković). With a specific sensibility, this DJ builds his artistic expression on the immediate experience of the African continent where he lived in the 1990s. With almost twenty years of experience as a DJ, experience as a radio promoter and producer, and dedication to sound and the search for the better and different, Zlijay is certainly one of the most prominent DJs from this area whose name stands for good sound and even better fun.

Basheskia & Edward EQ Live At KRAK Centar (03.09.2022.)

Zlijay (Zlatko Durakovic), with a specific sensibility, this DJ builds his artistic expression on the immediate experience of the African continent where he lived in the 1990s. With almost twenty years of experience as a DJ, experience as a radio promoter and producer, and dedication to sound and the search for the better and different, Zlijay is certainly one of the most prominent DJs from this area whose name stands for good sound and even better fun.

Zlijay - Live At KRAK Centar (03.09.2022.)

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