Padot na Vizantija (The Fall of the Byzantium in English) were one of the leading lights in the Yugoslavian post-punk scene. Singer Goran Trajkoski went on to participate in two legendary projects: Anastasia and Mizar (for a short tenure).
Yugoslavia
[Music] Saniboj Žugić – Uživo Kuća (1978)
Saniboj Žugić is a composer of electroacoustic music who hailed from Zagreb, Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia.
[Music] Opera Lu – Televizori
Music from the ex-Yugoslavia is a region well worth exploring. Everything from Industrial and goth to power-pop was well-represented, and a lot of this material holds up quite well. Take, for example, Opera Lu, a band from Sarajevo, whose New-Wave sound compares favorably to bands like The Buzzcocks and The Real Kids.
[Music] Duško Gojković & Sarajevo Big Band – Mujo Kuje (Doboy)
Duško Gojković made his name in the former Yugoslavia. He collaborates here with the Sarajevo Big Band out of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
[Music] Kismet – Love Will Tear Us Apart
Every time I go to Skopje, there is always someone who asks why on Earth I’d bother to come and stay such long periods of time in what they feel is an insignificant city in the heart of the Balkans. You can thank this song, the disc it came on, and a friendship with Gorazd Capovski and Ilija Stojanovski, for this.
I had worked at Tone Casualties records as an A&R Manager, and came across this disc while at my evening job, buying weird music for Aron’s Records (RIP). I had passed through what was then Yugoslavia a few years past, and knew a bit about Macedonian music, but the combination of goth/darkwave and an ethnic, Byzantine sound, came as a huge revelation. I never, in a million years, thought Love Will Tear Us Apart would sound perfect with bagpipes. A pleasant surprise which still strikes a chord after 20 years.
[Video] ABC Ansambl Angela Vlatkovića – Snovi (1975, LP)
One wonders if Blaxploitation soundtracks were big in the Former Yugoslavia. Here’s Serbian bandleader Angelo Vlatković funking out.
[Video] Aleksandar Subota – Watermelon Man (1970, LP)
Aleksandar ‘Saša’ Subota was a jazz musician from Belgrade, Serbia, who was quite a big player in the ex-Yugoslavian jazz scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, he does sterling work in covering Herbie Hancock’s 1962 classic.
[Video] Ivana Stefanović – The Epistle of Birds (1976)
Less a piece of music and more a gaggle of birds having their caterwauling manipulated expertly by Ivana Stefanović, who composed this piece of sound art inside the studios of Radio Belgrade.
A Miscellany Of Tasteful Music 