BLOG 21/11/2018
The Jan Diaries — Three Music-Culture Epicentres in Croatia
In late November 2018 The Jan Diaries came home. Tired of the standard circuit of clubs and festivals, Jan Kinčl mapped three Croatian places where music, space and people are curated with equal care — Galerija Cvajner in Pula, Pločnik in Zagreb and Adriatic Social Club in Split — and explained why their owners and programmes feel like one extended circle.
What the piece covers
Galerija Cvajner has stood on Pula’s Roman Forum since 1998, when Gorka and Boris Cvajner opened it in a former bank near the Temple of Augustus; beneath nine layers of paint and plaster they found, and carefully restored, frescoes from the early twentieth century. Since early 2013 Borut Cvajner and Tihana Nenadović have run the Ame evenings there — ambient music, jazz, light disco and soul paired with an exhibition of pictures or photographs — and Kinčl notes it took some two and a half years before Pula’s audience, used to harder partying, accepted them. He has played there every year since discovering the place around the end of 2014.
Pločnik, at Međimurska 21 in Zagreb, opened in late summer 2016: a café with vintage furniture on the ground floor, the PDV record shop and the Pozitivan Ritam office above, and a basement club for about a hundred people below. Behind it are Tamara Kranjec and Joeri Callens of Alii Consillium — Callens also runs the Lost Theory festival — and Vedran Meniga, whose Pozitivan Ritam produces Dimensions, Outlook, Seasplash and more. Kinčl calls it his second living room and spends Mondays there on fake Sundays, doing admin over quiet music. In Split, Adriatic Social Club at Lička 5 — opened in February 2018 by Matija Duić and Goran Ozretić, inspired by London’s Brilliant Corners — pairs a custom sound system and acoustic treatment with walls of records and books, and weekend programming that runs from Balearic sounds and boogie to Brazilian music, soul and jazz.
The part that stayed
Kinčl was involved with the Split club from the planning stage down to mopping floors hours before it opened, and that personal stake is the column’s real theme: the people behind all three rooms know each other, and together they widen the scene by giving creative people somewhere comfortable for ideas to happen. His advice for Zagreb is direct: “ako se na neki način hoćete uključiti u ’lifeline’ zagrebačke alternativne scene, dođite u Pločnik” — if you want to plug into the lifeline of Zagreb’s alternative scene, come to Pločnik.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Nine minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Tri glazbeno-kulturna epicentra u Hrvatskoj → redbull.com