The Underground Frequencies Manifesto
This manifesto refers to the goals and ideas of our platform and further explains the philosophy of how we plan to achieve our goals and defeat the obstacles we’ve stumbled upon and we might (or will) face in the future.
We plan to legalize Underground Frequencies and register it as a cultural NGO by end of 2021, or by the start of 2022. On this page you will find what our goals are, the problems that the Balkan music scene is facing, and our solutions to the same.
We seek for international support in order to achieve our goals, and we plan to do that by being completely transparent and strictly invest in the philosophy and goals we’re discussing about.
If you’re interested in learning more about who we are, please refer to the ‘About Us’ link.
Goal #1: Uniting the Balkan youth through the means of contemporary art
What we thrive towards is further uniting the scenes and the youth from all countries on the Balkans. The scenes of contemporary and alternative electronic music have shown that lots of intellectual youth are hungry and eager to learn about artists that come from their neighboring countries, while egress of openly available knowledge has been a barrier that we plan to slowly battle in order to share knowledge to our audience on how they can start publishing their own art, invite their favorite artists and even share all the resources and tips from established DJs and producers on crafting their very own creations that afterwards can be used to reach international crowds.
In the realms of the physical world, we plan to organize and help others in organizing events that would include Balkan electronic music artists from the whole region and further expand the barriers by giving the youth the resources and knowledge of everything that we do: event planning, creating music and essentially tips and resources for publishing their own art.
Furthermore, as our platform was based as a DIY webzine to connect the audiences of otherwise two very distinct and separate scenes (hip-hop and punk and metal), we tend to bring varieties and don’t let personal limitations to blind us from what’s essentially good music, as we have multiple volunteering editors with vast musical knowledge contributing to this.
The underground is a vast term and scary for most, however we believe that the most honest and raw music and art comes from it. The problem with the underground is that most people don’t have access to it as it’s often ignored by financial sponsors because of the inability to profit from it, and the bad stigma that’s carried on with years and years of open knowledge being suppressed from the mainstream scenes.
The problems that we are facing are mostly of xenophobic nature in their core, however even within the countries there are separations within the scenes of a musical style or genre that further limit collaboration, thus leaving the Balkans in a very bad international light simply because of the lack of collaboration inside the region itself.
The reason why our platform can overcome this issue, and hopefully motivate others to do the same is because we’re reliant on volunteers that come from all over the region, and always receive feedback from various art creators and crucial scene members from the international community, in order to guide our audience into what will essentially become a very friendly and collaborative atmosphere.
Another problem that’s tempering with the progress of the scene (especially in North Macedonia) is the fact that in the past various attempts of creating night clubs have ended up in separation and negative drama, simply because of the highly conservative bookers and influencers that limited their selection to styles only they seemed fit.
This other issue that the Macedonian music scene faces is often found in collaboration with other countries such as Kosovo, where promoters have departed during earlier years of the scene formation and now often act independently without the further labor to change things for better.
Whilst investigating the problem of this particular issue, we’ve came to the conclusion that the specific case of Macedonian and Kosovar exchanges didn’t happen because of internal conflicts, but happened because of the prior mentioned problem that the Macedonian scene was facing, and found no place whatsoever for promoting any artists that came from the Kosovar region.
A night club which is exempt from this is the oldest running club in Skopje called Kapan Han, which we came in terms to start managing it since the start of 2020, however, due to the pandemics this will be prolonged until the situation has been brought to control and our local government in North Macedonia finds a solution for in-house held events.
With the help of international organizations and other art and culture platforms that would like to support us, we can try and achieve the goal to have Kapan Han as the center of Balkan oriented contemporary art culture with DJs and artists that guest from all over the region.
Furthermore, Kapan Han is built in the XV-century during Ottoman times and resides in one of the oldest Bazaars in the Balkans, making it a perfect location as to what can become one place that our platform runs to bring artists from all over the region and promote and thrive for unity.
It is crucial that the issues of the Macedonian scene are put in the past after the pandemics is in the past, and events can again be organized, otherwise we will again stagnate and have difficulties to promote our goals of having Balkan artists and DJs to guest in the capital of the country Skopje.
Our solution isn’t by strictly making Kapan Han as the in-house nightclub that promotes unity, the solution is slowly pushing the whole scene towards change in their attitude of rotating their in-house artists and DJs whilst ignoring the young upcoming talents, or simply artists from other countries because of reasons of profit and non-marketability.
For example, Albania faces a completely different problem than what Macedonia’s or Kosovo’s scenes face. In Albania the electronic music scene is still in its infancy and this can be very crippling to the whole culture scene in the country, but can be defeated with bringing knowledge and resources freely available of charge to anyone who is interested in either creating their own events, or starting to craft art from scratch.
An event that we tried to organize in 2019 called Rawrave, only proved that the youth from Macedonia, Serbia and Kosovo want unity and together removing any inequality and politics by the means of electronic music. Even if the event failed to happen, the interest and the audience that was coming was mature and eager for letting go steam in the best way possible: through the means of sweating and dancing.
On another note, we would again seek for international help in organizing the event as soon as our government finds a solution for in-house events, in which we can invite artists from Kosovo, Albania, Greece, Bosnia, Bulgaria and others from the region into one place, and slowly even bring people from the international scene inside North Macedonia, to revive a dancing scene that has early roots but has been devastated by the above mentioned problems.
Our plan to fight the negative stigma that’s surrounded by the underground and contemporary electronic scene is very simple. Most often drugs and the term ‘junkies’ are mentioned, and we plan to fight this industry-led stereotypes by partnering with NGO’s like HOPS that exist to prevent damage from drug usage and bring education that leads to less harm at the end.
We will not deny the fact that internationally drugs are often associated with the electronic scene in general, however, in countries such as Germany and France the solution has always been to inform people and bring them a safe surrounding whilst battling the problems from the negative sides that illegal substances may arise.
Goal #2: Balkan vinyl-pressing platform
Back in Yugoslavia, the state-owned PGP-RTB was the countries biggest distributor and manufacturer of vinyl records. What’s interesting is that RTB didn’t only publish Yugoslav music, lots of pop and rock classics found their way onto the shelves of music stores, and that gave the people access to music that comes outside the country itself.
We seek for financial help from international organizations that will provide us the means to create a vinyl manufacturing platform that will release music from the region.