Àsino Elettronico

Like many others in the mid- to late 2000s, this story also began with people sharing niche interests through an online forum. In early 2008, Nemanja Dunđerski (Xiqhhyiecryn/Associative) started one named ĆaoZdravo, to which I was introduced by a mutual friend, Stevan Pivnički (Youth A.D.).

While my memory fails me on whether there had been any sort of explicit "manifesto" laid out on the platform, it was clear that one common thread was a passion for electronic music of different styles, but altogether far removed from mainstream circles. And this is exactly what brought people together there, despite each and every one having their own unique background — we, after all, did grow up with limited availability of music where loyalty to a genre and a local scene was rewarded by improved access to releases.

Incredibly, the forum managed to quickly attract not just passionate consumers of such music in Serbia, but also a large proportion of what you would call bedroom producers. This meant that a lot of activity on the forum was also centered around the showcasing of demos or small DIY releases.

To understand why forming a netlabel around all of this was the most natural thing to do, one has to consider the general state of the music industry and technology at that moment. This was a short-lived limbo between dying physical media (CDs primarily) and the birth of proper streaming; everyone was listening to mp3 files either on a desktop computer or some sort of player with internal storage, mobile phones included. Meanwhile, the internet was living its golden age, with decent transfer speeds and a ton of ways to freely share all these files — still largely free of influencers, toxicity, and the pervasiveness of modern social media.

All this rapidly rising informational and artistic noise made it harder to stand out among every other person with a cracked copy of Ableton Live and a folder of VSTs.

Being organized and presentable by having a neatly packed digital release increased one's chance of actually being heard — remember that this still meant you needed to incentivize the audience to download, unpack, and hit play in Winamp before anything else. A netlabel wasn't just a promise that someone took care of technicalities such as mastering, proper file naming, metadata, or an album cover, but also that some sort of curation was going on behind the scenes. Or at least that was the hope — because the digital format costs nothing, some netlabels misread this as a signal to put up literally anything that was sent to them, as long as it loosely fit the genre.

Àsino Elettronico was meant to be a counter-measure to these: a place where you find precisely those who do not fit into a genre-specific context yet approach their work with care and craft. This is also why our tagline was simply "The Unusual".

Initially, the idea around all this formed between Nemanja, Stevan, and myself; however, Stevan very early on disengaged entirely in favor of another local community that was more closely aligned with his industrial-leaning musical style. Starting with the consensus around the name and onward, it was just Nemanja and me at the core of the organization.

The name itself came from an earlier internet magazine concept of mine that never took off beyond initial drafts, the literal translation from Italian being "Electronic Donkey".

The symbolism was centered around stubbornness, nonconformity, as well as a tendency to emit sounds that most people don't necessarily find pleasing. But it was also perhaps about being misunderstood, loyal, and gentle in its true nature.

The Italian language was also an interesting choice for me personally, as I was heavily influenced by their approach to much of alternative electronic music — often unique, quirky, and quite difficult to pigeonhole, even when it supposedly belonged to a certain scene. In particular, the label Minus Habens from Bari was a huge influence.

I remember Sheffield's Warp Records being another major influence on both Nemanja and myself, and this was very subtly reflected in my design of our slanted wordmark and the slightly retro-futuristic vibe of it. The Warp influence was also indicative of an IDM-adjacent sound that seemed to be the most common among producers we had on the forum initially. In time, this tendency evolved in different directions for everyone, but more on that later.

The two of us had most of the basics down when it came to the skills required to run the label. Nemanja, with his IT background and employment with one of the major local ISPs, was able to handle the web hosting logistics, just as he had already been doing with ĆaoZdravo. I, on the other hand, was equipped to deal with visuals and some content/PR. We were also lucky to have Aleksandar Andonovski (Nesbo) to help us immensely by volunteering his mastering skills throughout the years.

It's important to note that right from the beginning, there was a conscious decision to remove profit, or just money in general, from the picture as much as humanly possible. Not that we were expecting any, anyway — it was just something we needed to openly make clear and manage expectations around. Licensing-wise, we immediately went with Creative Commons, with the aim to make any sort of redistribution fully legal as long as it meant nobody else was also profiting off it in any way. Any minor expense along the way was covered by the two of us; however, this was altogether fairly modest even by the standards of those economically challenging times.

You would think a bar this low would mean a plethora of active netlabels, even in a small country such as Serbia, but this was actually not the case at all. I could speculate on other reasons, too, but in my experience, this would mostly boil down to a lack of motivation and incentive for an average person to deal even with such relatively benign commitments.

The rewards mainly boil down to building a community and enjoying the time you get to spend around like-minded people, and understandably, this doesn't exactly cut it for most.

Most of the preparations were done somewhere by mid-2008, and the first concrete step was to gather the existing talent around a compilation that would immediately showcase what we were about and how much more potential there was to be explored in the upcoming years.

With contributions gathered over the course of the next several months, in December 2008 we officially launched by releasing Fusion Mutation, a compilation of 8 tracks specifically produced for it, each by a different artist (all of whom were also members of the ĆaoZdravo forum — not much luck was found elsewhere). Roughly 100 physical copies in full jewel case packaging were produced to share around, but also, more importantly, to send for reviews, mainly to local or regional media and platforms.

The several reviews we secured were for the most part quite positive and supportive, but also often — I felt, at least — with a slight tinge of possible misunderstanding of what all this music or the label itself actually was and how serious we were about it. This wasn’t too surprising. Although Serbia had always consumed a decent amount of electronic music, it had rarely been very confident or enthusiastic about local efforts in creating it, regardless of genre. This was mainly in contrast to guitar-based artists that habitually gathered most of the undivided attention even in alternative media of the time (such as Popboks). We were, of course, mature enough to understand upfront that there wouldn’t be any red carpet rolled out for us — after all, our whole mission was based around swimming against the current. The modest attention we got was appreciated enough to keep us going.

All of us inside the community were amateurs one way or another — nobody was making a living out of music — but even on an amateur level, there are clear differences in how seriously one takes things. You could always find someone happy to upload a casual demo track or two to the forum, but few were focused enough to develop a complete piece of work that could carry itself.

We were quite stringent on this, even if it meant not putting out anything for months or even a year.

Already during the making of Fusion Mutation, two more people stood out as the most dedicated, skilled, and simply musically talented. Predrag Savić (Abadroza) and Nemanja Lazić (under his given name, but later also under the Andrei Korre pseudonym) were crucial during the whole existence of the label and beyond, even if they were not formally responsible for the logistics of it all. Each contributed some of the strongest albums in the catalog and helped diversify our sound further. They were also the ones we kept in touch with all these years and consulted on all things relevant to the legacy of Àsino Elettronico, as they are forever a fully integral part of it.

Another resident artist on the label was Bojan Tufegdžić (The Demiurge), who appeared out of the blue roughly two years in with the impressive quality of his work. In retrospect, the album we eagerly released as soon as he finished it was merely a hint at the scope of his talent that he continued to prove afterwards. Unfortunately, most of his work is also lost to the public, as he would eventually disappear and remove all of its traces.

After a round-up of solo and collaborative releases from the total of five of us — releases AE002 through AE007, spanning mid-2009 to mid-2011 — the overall climate had changed significantly. A lot of the momentum had been lost by then, but the stagnation had less to do with the music itself and more with the facts of life: career, relationships, shifting priorities, and existential issues. There were also encroaching rapid changes in how music was consumed and how people connected and learned about it online.

Sometime around 2011, there was also something of an almost synchronized shift in musical sensibilities internally, perhaps more pronounced in Dunđerski, Lazić, and me in particular. There were fewer and fewer IDM and similar abstract influences and much more flirting with techno and even deep house. So much so that Dunđerski mostly abandoned his old moniker to focus on Associative, a new Elektron Machinedrum-driven project with an Afro-tech twist. Lazić also started using Andrei Korre as a fresh identity to push for a more dancefloor-friendly but deep sound, while I kept the name but leaned more into my renewed fascination with Detroit techno. And while Predrag stayed fairly true to his retro-ish acid style, ironically it now seemed to fit even better with the group. Despite these strong new influences, it’s important to stress that we did make sure to stay true to the spirit of the label by focusing on our unique personal interpretations of these styles.

This sort of recalibration, together with some modest standalone hardware acquired over time, prompted us to look into organizing a full night live show with the four of us, playing individually one after another. Worth noting, we were slightly ahead of the trend by a few years, pushing for a computer-free setup and relying fully on grooveboxes, synths, and effect processors.

Taking it to the stage wasn't just the next logical step; it seemed like the only remaining way to connect with a new audience and reignite our old one.

This materialized in a show put together at CK13 (Crna Kuća) in Novi Sad in late 2011. Since both Dunđerski and Lazić lived in Novi Sad, it made perfect sense to make that a starting point. And while the performances went quite well with a decent turnout of people, this is also where we learned firsthand how exhausting and disappointing dealing with venues can be. The original idea was to then continue with the same concept in Belgrade (where I lived) and Kragujevac (home of Abadroza), but a combination of our inability to secure any reasonable agreement with possible venues and what I can only remember as a prolonged burst of work-related pressure put all this to an early stop.

By early 2012, it started to make more sense to make plans for a meaningful closure rather than some new strategic step for the future. We felt the best way to do it would be to take one final sonic snapshot of our community. Effectively representing the swan song of the label, Fusion Mutation 2 resulted in a more mature and rich successor to the compilation that started it all. Released as digital-only with very little promotion in January 2013, it marked the official end of the road for Àsino Elettronico, closely followed by the deactivation of the ĆaoZdravo forum. The core group of four of us continued to stay in touch, even if it was mostly remotely and without much direct interaction of a musical kind.

Over the years, we were privileged to enjoy steady support from a number of very dedicated listeners, some of whom were just as important to this story as any of the artists mentioned. A conscious decision to take the time and effort to give us and our music a chance, be it by listening or attending an event, was something we never took for granted.

In the end, it’s difficult to measure the impact Àsino Elettronico made over the five years of its existence and beyond. I am sure it became a meaningful part of life for those who participated one way or another, possibly inspired a few more, but any sort of more formal, tangible recognition never came its way.

To a large extent, it was a product of its time and made most sense while such specific circumstances lasted.

To the best of my knowledge, nothing similar came after it, and any sort of successful local electronic music communities or organizations revolved mainly around DJing and thematic parties. To illustrate my point, Live Soundtrack, a series of improvisational events that combine experimental short film with live musical performances (started in 2014), in many cases had to resort to an Àsino-related roster, as the new generation didn’t quite show up to carry the torch the way we hoped.

It could be said in general that very little, if anything, exists right now in the vacuum between the two extremes on the local scene: fairly strictly club-based production on one end and highly improvisational, high-brow avant-garde on the other.

There is some hope that maybe a story such as this one will inspire a new collective of artists looking to break out of the creative paralysis brought on by short-lived algorithmic trends, opting for more mutual connection and collaboration instead.