Speak to any real tech-head these days and they’ll tell you that Eastern Europe now has some of the finest places in the world to party. From Belgrade to Kiev, Tallinn to Tbilisi, these places have become tourist hubs for electronic music enthusiasts, with the festivals, spaces and musicians to match. To find out  more about just why techno has taken such a hold in the region, we spoke with a couple of creatives from Serbia to explain the rise.

 

Bogomir Doringer is a Serbian artist, researcher and curator from Belgrade, now based in Amsterdam. His diverse work attempts to map socio-political trends in societies through art production, often with unique, subversive themes. His most interesting project to date has to be “Dance of Urgency”, which attempts to show that the way people dance in clubs can change based on the political climate outside of the dancefloor – that a country in crisis will inform the way that young people go out and express themselves when listening to electronic music. He told me about his findings from the project, how his ideas for it started growing up in Belgrade during the Yugoslavian conflict of the late '90s and whether he thinks techno can fundamentally change societies for the good.

​