In Kosovo, Techno Is a Symbol of Resilience

Paraclitus Pictures (Genald Komino)

This is part of Global Sounds, a collection of stories spotlighting the music trends forging connections in 2024.

In 2004, four years before Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, 16-year-old Patrik Ukiq decided to throw a party. Born and raised in the capital of Pristina, he had recently discovered house and electronic music after an older cousin, who had been immersed in the UK rave scene, brought back a couple of CDs. Those led him to online forums, where techno heads from all over the world were swapping notes on new releases and foreign DJs, and eventually, to a harebrained idea: Ukiq would fly Felipe, a well known DJ, over from Vienna to perform in Kosovo—a rare thing to happen due to post-war red tape at the border; even more so for a teenager to be the one orchestrating it. “I wasn’t even old enough for the club that I had booked him at. When I met this guy at the airport he didn’t want anything to do with me,” says Ukiq, who hadn’t revealed his age when booking the DJ. “But [I got into the club] and he ended up playing into the early hours of the morning. I was so happy. That’s when I thought, ‘this is my sound.’”

It’s a stifling June night in Pristina when I meet up with Ukiq, now 36 and a certified charmer, outside his bar Servis Fantazia. It’s a low-lit spot with a purple neon glow and the DJ booth is packed with vinyl. Just down the street, giant screens blasting the Euro soccer championships dominate Mother Teresa Boulevard—a leafy pedestrianized avenue lined with cafes that cuts through the center of town—and all around us young Kosovars are gathering in groups with anticipation for the night ahead, sipping on cold bottles of cheap Peja beer and leaning in close to light each other’s cigarettes. The trance-y, heavy thud of techno pounds out of the Servis soundsystem. Just a few days before, the city had marked 25 years since the end of the Kosovo War—and there is a sense of possibility in the air.

It’s been a landmark year for Kosovo. In addition to honoring the 25th anniversary, 2024 saw the 16-year-old nation join Europe’s Schengen Zone (after years of false starts), a generation-defining moment that means Kosovar passport holders can now travel freely around the European Union without a visa—effectively changing the lives of a generation who have not been able to move around their own continent with ease. At the Pristina airport, there are just as many Kosovars getting ready to travel out of the country as there are welcoming others in, a sight that would have been almost unimaginable just nine months ago. “A lot of people have never traveled beyond Macedonia before. Everyone is excited. In January, we all had our flights booked,” says Ukiq. “We’ve been very isolated.”

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian forces—led by dictator Slobodan Milošević—subjected ethnic Albanians to brutal violence. It was intended to suppress Kosovo’s autonomy as its own state, and one that led to a more than year-long conflict that was ended by a 1999 NATO intervention and bombing. Some 13,000 people were killed—many of whom were ethnic Albanians; often by mass killings—and tens of thousands more were displaced. Since then, Kosovo and its people have slowly been finding its feet as a fledgling nation while still wrestling with its recent past: rebuilding cities, writing national anthems, reclaiming cultural and religious spaces that were taken away in acts of ethnic cleansing (225 out of approximately 607 mosques in Kosovo were destroyed), and preserving what is left of a Kosovar culture that can be traced back thousands of years.

As I knock back a few beers with Ukiq, he tells me how that same techno-loving cousin who lent him those CDs suggested that the family open a bar after the war. Following years of being banned from cultural spaces like cinemas and theaters, a place to drink and gather freely as ethnic Albanians was necessary and cherished—and, suddenly, filled with opportunity.

Twenty five years on, nightlife is now a driving force of Pristina. Along the narrow street of 2 Korriku that leads from the boulevard to Servis Fantazia, both electronic and mainstream pop blasts out of vibrating bars, punctuated by takeout stands slinging kebabs to line people’s stomachs. In the 1990s, that same energy could be found in the Kurrizi, a network of underground bars and clubs playing everything from techno to jazz to punk, which lay below the residential Dardania neighborhood of the city. It was dismantled by oppressive Serbian forces as the war took hold, but young Kosovars continued to look to clubbing as an avenue for escape—from grief, from trauma, from boredom—in the aftermath. It was a trend that swept much of the region following both the break up of Yugoslavia and the fall of the Soviet Union.

For Kosovo, the soundtrack to both its post-war struggle and collective euphoria was electronic music. An early watermark of this time was The Road of Peace Train, which saw a group of Kosovar and Serbian ravers hitch themselves to a freight train, assemble some turntables, and blast ‘90s electronica as they rode across the former Yugoslavia in 2002, from Pristina to Skopje, in a symbol of unity. A tight knit community of DJs, promoters, and musicians has since formed, starting club nights, opening underground venues, and throwing festivals that pound with the heavy beats of house and techno until sunrise: parties like Episode, one of the first DJ nights to be established after the war; the late Spray Club, often credited with cementing clubbing culture into the foundations of 2000s Pristina; and the recently founded Bliss, Bliss, Bliss collective. It’s a movement that, while well covered online, has morphed and evolved behind sealed borders: Largely unable to perform outside of the country due to visa restrictions, and with few international DJs flying in, the scene has been driven by Kosovars, for Kosovars.

Jeta Veseli

“Parties [after the war] introduced us to a new way of receiving culture, listening to music, and being together,” Rina Meta, a Pristina-born creative who recently collaborated with Montez Press Radio on a series about Kosovo’s cultural landscape, told me over the phone. “This music scene was shaped in isolation. You never created music with an audience in mind, only your friends.”

***

The Palace of Youth and Sports is a large, brutalist piece of architecture from the 1970s that looms over this city of 227,154 people like a monolith. It was formerly named Boro and Ramiz after Boro Vukmirović and Ramiz Sadiku, two World War II Yugoslav Partisans of Serbian and Albanian descent, commonly referred to as a gesture of “brotherhood and unity.” For years it functioned as a sports and community complex, hosting tournaments and other large events, even a 1989 miner’s strike against the ongoing destruction of Kosovo’s autonomy. After a fire in 2000, though, parts of it were thrown into disuse and left to ruin.

On our first evening together, a few rounds deep, Ukiq decides he wants to show it to me. In addition to his bar, Ukiq runs Servis, a multidisciplinary platform that promotes and organizes underground club nights across Kosovo, with his buddy Leo Lumezi, a Pristina-based DJ. They began throwing parties together 20 years ago, not long after Ukiq flew that DJ over from Vienna, initially setting up sound systems deep in the forests that fringe the outskirts of Pristina. In 2016, they turned their attention to urban spaces, repurposing some of Pristina’s disused public buildings like Kino Rinia, a 1950s cinema that was a site of social resistance in its heyday, and Palace of Youth.

Walking through the halls of one of the building’s cavernous wings, past scribbles of graffiti and below giant concrete stairwells, our footsteps echo like a metronome. Ukiq points out where the DJs set up—sometimes monthly, now on a more scattered schedule—and describes how thousands of ravers cram together under the illuminated Servis symbol of a lightning bolt to lose themselves for the night. “We want people to dance in buildings and places that truly represent Pristina,” he says, casting his hand towards Salla e Kuqe, or Red Hall, where a recent party was thrown. Down a hallway, the faint sound of a violin drifts through the crack of a door—in another part of the Palace of Youth, he tells me, the Kosovo Philharmonic holds its rehearsals.

While Ukiq establishes himself as my unofficial guide, my party partner for the next few days is my close friend Marta, who I’d persuaded at the last minute to hop on a flight from Zurich, where she lives, and join me in Pristina. Marta is Belgrade-born, Kyiv-raised, but we’d met at art school in Glasgow in the late 2000s and spent the best part of four years living on neighboring streets, staying up too late, and introducing each other to the kind of shared interests—books, movies, music—that end up shaping you into the adults you’ll soon become. We’d also discovered clubbing together, and came of age at legendary Glasgow electronic spots like The Arches and Sub Club, seeking various forms of ecstasy below the altar of the DJ booth. Though we were largely oblivious at the time, we were dancing in the footsteps of UK ‘90s rave culture—a reaction by British youth against conservatism. This, I learn while chatting with Marta and Ukiq as he closes up Servis Fantazia for the night, included members of the Kosovar diaspora who had moved to the UK in the ‘90s and found themselves swept up in the energy of the movement and wider club scene. When it was safe to return home, many brought back stories of the music and parties they’d experienced—and ideas of how to plant similar seeds in Kosovo.

One of those people was the father of Dua Lipa: Dukagjin Lipa, the Pristina-born music entrepreneur and founder of marketing agency Republika Communications. He founded Sunny Hill, the now annual Pristina music festival that aims to bring international musicians to Kosovo, while highlighting homegrown talent that hasn’t had the opportunity to perform outside of the country due to travel restrictions. The festival has been a useful tool to raise international awareness around visa inequality, with the Lipas vocally campaigning for Kosovo’s Schengen membership. This year’s event, which took place last month, was the first since Kosovo joined, and saw major artists including Stormzy and Burna Boy perform, as well as local electronic DJs like Adrian Berisha, who daylights as the executive director at Hajde Foundation, a non-profit geared towards promoting and supporting art and culture in Kosovo.

Fati Gjakova

Even now, the festival remains a family affair. I grab lunch with Fati Gjakova, Dukagjin’s nephew and the festival’s program director, in the shady garden of Tiffany, a beloved Pristina restaurant buzzing with the hum of lunchtime chatter. Gjakova, who is responsible for booking the local and electronic artists performing at Sunny Hill, quickly takes up the mantle of Kosovar hospitality and orders generously for us: heapings of warm dolma (minced meat and rice stuffed in vine leaves), lamb kofta simmering in tomato sauce, and Albanian style manti (a type of dumpling also found in Turkey, nodding to the region’s historical ties with the Ottoman Empire), along with piles of warm pita and accompanying dips. For Gjakova, this summer feels like a crossroads. “There are all these [Kosovar] artists who just haven’t had the same possibilities as those in other European countries,” he says, noting that Kosovo has the youngest population in northern Europe (70% is under 35). “I've waited for visas in front of embassies myself, I know what it’s like. We’ve tried to use [Sunny Hill] as a platform to spread the voice of our youth. And now that we can travel freely, you can feel the energy. We feel free.”

Like everyone I meet in Pristina, Gjakova, 36, has his own memories of the war. “Can you imagine being 10 years old?” he says, tearing apart a piece of pita with his hands. “For a long time after, I’d hear fireworks and I would fear them because of the noises they reminded me of.” To be planning a 140,000-person music festival in the heart of Pristina, then, one where the boom of the bass is a heartbeat not an alarm bell, is a tangible example of how far a country can come in 25 years—and a vision of its future. After lunch, Gjakova drives me over to take a look at the festival site firsthand. There is, admittedly, not that much for me to see when we get there, but in the coming weeks, stages and lights would be erected, and over four days in late July, crowds would walk across the grass seeking the same sense of togetherness that these events are known to bring. As we amble across the field, he points to hundreds of baby pine and linden trees freshly planted in rows along its border, each one set to grow taller with every year the festival returns—a small yet undeniable gesture of optimism.

***

Late one night, still wobbly from seeing the sun rise the previous morning, Marta and I catch a cab to Zone Club, which lies in the rather barren Industrial Zone about 25 minutes outside of the city center. The largest nightclub in Kosovo, it’s a kind of catchall for every type of Kosovar who’s looking to dance, from the club kids to the 9-to-5ers— and a testament to the hold electronic music still has on the population. It’s the first night of the season’s summer programming and a couple Kosovar artists are playing including EraMah, a blonde, fresh-faced newcomer on the scene who goes on at dawn. Inside, the fog of smoke and dry ice reduce everyone to jerky, dancing silhouettes. By 3 a.m. most people have reached a state of euphoria; Marta and myself have fallen back into the rhythm of those early dancefloors we discovered together, moving alongside strangers with the ease that only the anonymity of a dark nightclub will afford you. Up in the VIP area we spot Ukiq, who pulls us past the velvet rope (Zone has long shed the no frills approach of the underground) and behind the DJ to join his sister’s birthday party. “Pristina is a small city,” Mahmutxhiku had told me the day before. “Wherever, whenever, there's a party, everyone goes.”

If Zone is what the commercial evolution of Pristina’s nightlife looks like, then Sadie Suhodolli and Linda Suhodolli, also known as Tadi and Matale, are a sign of what’s coming up. The sisters are the DJs behind Bijat, a feminist collective that organizes queer parties within what is still a male-dominated underground space. To try and make the club scene more inclusive, both in terms of who is granted opportunities to perform and who is able to access often prohibitively expensive equipment, they’ve begun hosting DJ workshops for the community. Pay inequity is an ongoing issue for artists, a young queer DJ tells me outside Bubble Pub, Kosovo’s only LGBTQ+ bar, which was opened by transgender activist Lendi Mustafa last year.

When we swing by, a student of the Suhodolli sisters, sporting a mop of curly hair and a loose tank top, is behind the turntables, mixing genres that slip from deep house to techno to bursts of pop, on a tiny sweatbox of a stage. The night is only just beginning, but while the dance floor has yet to fill up, the space between our bodies feels less like an absence and more like a pause amid change. A generation of Kosovar clubbers who have no memory of war move fluidly together under the disco ball.

Just 25 years after the war that established it, the tiny nation gives a masterclass in preserving culture—one that was almost lost forever.

Outside in the crowded smoking area, I spot Jeta Veseli, a warm-natured, twenty-something architect with bangs who I’d met earlier that day. She’s one of the three founding members of Bliss, Bliss, Bliss, a collective born out of a somewhat spontaneous party thrown in May 2023, when the group took over the rooftop of the Grand Hotel, a once iconic property that has largely fallen into disrepair and is now best known for its exceedingly low occupancy rate of 1%. (In a 2018 New York Times story, an acerbic reporter likened the crumbling hotel’s limbo-like state to that of post-war Kosovo itself.) Since then, the collective has been recording tracks and live sets from parties and uploading them to Soundcloud; another of the founders, Leart Rama, is a curator of DokuFest, an independent film festival in the southern city of Prizren, and the entire Bliss crew has been involved in a short film about their generation’s inability to travel anywhere. (What better way to feel less trapped, Veseli notes, than through musical distraction?)

Now that they can move freely throughout Europe, though, Bliss has already played multiple times in Berlin. It’s partly to grow their audience (and exciting, Veseli is quick to add), but also due to limitations when it comes to securing spaces for parties in Pristina—even in a city so imbued with club culture, there are increasingly limited available spaces to take over, and the underground spirit is running up against tangible barriers. “There are issues with the police,” says Veseli, noting that parties and events are more regularly shut down by authorities or suffocated by a lack of government funding—an issue that a lengthy Resident Advisor story on Kosovo’s electronic scene also reported on a few years back. Among some organizers, including Veseli, there’s a concern that a lack of government support for arts and culture, combined with the arrival of the Schengen membership, might result in Kosovo losing the energy behind its club scene instead of fostering it, as DJs and promoters seek to perform in countries with more established support systems for artists. When I ask Veseli why clubbing has become such an important part of Kosovar culture, she doesn’t miss a beat. “The same reason clubbing always does,” she says. “It comes from a place of struggle and isolation. It’s a release.”

A parallel can be drawn between Kosovo’s relationship with electronic music and that of Berlin, where abandoned buildings and other disused spaces were transformed into party venues after the fall of the wall. Over thirty years later, Berlin’s club scene has grown into a tenet of the tourism industry, drawing in 1.5 billion Euros annually pre-pandemic. Arbnor Dragaj, the co-founder of Hapësira (“space” in Albanian), which used to organize parties and other cultural events out of the defunct Rilindja newspaper printing house in Pristina, believes the government doesn’t see the opportunities for the country among Kosovo’s creative scene. At Hapësira’s peak, it was throwing 1,500-person raves at Rilindja, but privatization of the building meant they lost the space—even with support from the German ambassador, who saw the same potential in Kosovo’s scene that her country had found in its own. “I’ve been engaged in the electronic music industry most of my life,” says Dragaj. “It’s always sleeping in me, it excites me, and I’ve seen the impact on society it can have. But it’s hard to keep the momentum without financial support and incentives. People become tired of supporting something or somebody without that.”

Hajrulla Ceku, Kosovo’s Minister of Culture, Youth, and Sport, asserts that clubbing and the electronic scene is an “active component of Kosovo’s cultural landscape”—a landscape that he describes as deeply intertwined with the historical trauma and the collective memory of the conflict. Ceku says that efforts have been made to increase the budget designated to fund arts and culture in Pristina, and also to showcase it abroad through the government’s ‘Mobility Fund,’ an initiative that was aimed at helping musicians and artists apply for visas and travel outside of the country. However, he acknowledges that the past few years haven’t been easy for clubbing culture in Pristina: “The pandemic had a significant impact on the scene,” he tells me over WhatsApp. “Despite the industry’s gradual recovery and the emergence of new organizing entities, the interruption affected clubbing trends, especially among younger audiences.”

Dragaj has far from lost faith in the momentum of the clubbing community, however, and is already getting to work on a new nightlife venture called PARADA with a mission to elevate new electronic talent and source venues for their performances. And if the volume of international visitors for Sunny Hill in July is anything to go by (international visitors made up 45% of the total number of attendees this year), Kosovo clearly has the potential to establish itself as a major music destination that reaches far beyond its borders.

Access to Palace of Youth as a rave space has been getting harder, so earlier this month Servis went back to its roots and threw a party in the forest of Llukar, an area just outside of Pristina. Ukiq is knee deep in party planning when we meet one June evening shortly before I leave Kosovo, and by this point my body is starting to feel the toll of 5 a.m. bedtimes. But another night means another party: EraMah is playing to an amped up weekend crowd at Servis Fantazia, while revelers at Bubble Pub round the corner are spilling out onto the street. We decide to walk 20 minutes through the city to Old Town—Ukiq’s heard about a party being thrown in a basement tucked behind a mosque. It’s a small DIY venue that’s cropped up recently, and he wants me and Marta to experience it for ourselves. We take our time meandering over, ripping cigarettes together amid a suffocating summer heat that refuses to break. At one point, Marta spots sculptures of stars twinkling at the top of the Grand Hotel in the distance, part of a work by 38-year-old Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj. Amid them are giant block letters that read “When the sun goes away, we paint the sky” in Albanian.

We run into friends of Ukiq who are also looking for the party—everyone in Pristina seems to know Ukiq I’ve now learned. But when we finally arrive, the whole place has been shut down by the police. The turntables and sound system have been unplugged and the lights turned on. Underneath my feet, cigarette butts lie on the ground like confetti, hundreds of tiny benchmarks of the loud, sweaty hours that came before. Some spaces are more than just a place to gather. The dance floor is where we lose ourselves first, and then remind each other of our existence.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler