The Jan Diaries — Honey, I Am Going to Berlin!

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 25 September 2018

The third entry of The Jan Diaries opens in the Lufthansa lounge at Munich airport, where Jan Kinčl is stuck for twelve hours with Pytzek’s Autumn Days Are Here mix in his headphones, after storms over Berlin sent his plane circling and finally elsewhere. The delay produced the most useful text of the series so far: a sober look at what Berlin actually gives an electronic musician — and what it quietly takes.

What the piece covers

Berlin, Kinčl writes, is globally the capital of electronic music: the industry, the artists, the labels, the promoters and the clubs are concentrated there, and mass migrations of musicians have been reshaping the city since the mid-2000s. The column lists the advantages honestly — the whole infrastructure in one place, cheap flights that make an artist easy to book, no real need for German any more, costs still below London — and then the other side: a saturated market, the reset to zero that comes with any move abroad, and a city where something is happening twenty-four hours a day, which is exactly as dangerous for an undisciplined person as it sounds.

His own answer is Croatia: family, friends and his team are there, the sea and the mountains are hours away, and the relative boredom is what makes studio work possible. The past two years in the studio with Regis — backed by Vedran Meniga, Pozitivan Ritam and the PDV label — had just turned into a first album he could hold in his hands. Germany, he notes, is still the world’s third music market after the USA and the UK, and the energy that once pulled in David Bowie, Depeche Mode and Iggy Pop has not gone anywhere.

The part that stayed

The best argument is an anecdote. Ten minutes before closing, Kinčl walked into the Oye Records shop and handed his album to the man behind the counter, mentioning the independent Croatian label it came out on. The man listened for a moment — and turned out to be a co-owner of the shop. Within ten minutes small talk had become concrete plans, which is the whole case for showing up in person. “Dobru glazbu je teško ignorirati” — good music is hard to ignore, Kinčl concludes, recommending a spring visit and a detour through David Byrne’s writing on how a musician’s time really splits: half on the music, half on finding the people who will amplify it.

Read the full piece

The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Eight minutes.

The Jan Diaries | Draga, idem u Berlin! → redbull.com