BLOG 10/09/2018
The Jan Diaries — The Music That Leads to Berlin
In September 2018 Red Bull invited Jan Kinčl to Berlin for the twentieth anniversary of the Red Bull Music Academy, and the opening entry of The Jan Diaries explains why the invitation mattered. It arrived at the end of an intense summer: In Plain Sight, the album Kinčl made with Regis Kattie over almost two years, had just come out on the Croatian label PDV — and now the Academy whose lectures had quietly educated him for over a decade was calling him to its birthday.
What the piece covers
Kinčl traces his first contact with the Academy to around 2004, when Tomo Pupavac — DJ Tom, Red Bull’s man on the ground — organised workshops for local DJs and producers, and Zagreb producer Davor Ostojić travelled to the Academy in Rome, a stay that led to him working with Mark Pritchard of Global Communication on his debut album Sozial Freischwebende. Then the column turns to the format itself: RBMA lectures are filmed conversations with people who made music history, one to two hours long, with the final quarter left for questions. Kinčl estimates he has watched seventy to eighty percent of everything ever recorded.
The names give the text its weight. Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic, remembered above all for his modesty. Questlove, who told his audience he was working eight jobs and getting up at five in the morning to practise three hours a day — and still considered it nowhere near enough. Mastering engineer Rashad Becker of Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, whose ideas unsettled Kinčl’s thinking in the best way. Theo Parrish, whose lecture the column describes as a kind of bible. And Robert Hood, in tears watching footage of a 1991 performance from his Underground Resistance years alongside Mad Mike Banks and Jeff Mills. The list runs on through Ice-T, Chuck D, DJ Premier, Madlib, Nile Rodgers, Moritz von Oswald and members of the Sun Ra Arkestra.
The part that stayed
The column’s real claim is personal. In his mid-thirties, roughly eighteen years into music, Kinčl credits the Academy’s lecture archive and the RBMA Daily articles as more formative than his formal education — not only in music, but in how he thinks about history, politics, psychology and geography. Berlin, in that light, was not a junket but a pilgrimage.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Six minutes.