Dok'n'Ritam Honors Drummer Piko Stancic at SOKOJ Club

Ivan Piko Stancic has spent more decades behind the drums than most musicians manage to stay in a single band, and that persistence is exactly why he will be the subject of a special panel on Sunday, September 27, at 6 PM, at SOKOJ club. The panel, titled “From 01 to 011 and Back: The New Wave Rhythm of Zagreb and Belgrade as a Life’s Mission,” carries a small irony of its own, since this is a drummer who is hard to pin to a single city. He moved between two telephone area codes, two scenes that the 1990s border split apart, each making its own music on its own side, even though earlier, within the same new wave movement, they shared the same rhythm. Alongside moderator Sandra Rancic, the panel will feature Srdjan Gojkovic Gile, Maks Juricic, Emil Tedeski and Andrea Stalcar Furac, people who watched Piko both from the stage and from the studio. According to the organizers, the speakers will look at him through every role he has played: drummer and band member, rhythmic architect, producer, and the man who shaped the very aesthetics of the sound.

That panel is just one part of the program that the 11th edition of the Dok’n’Ritam music documentary festival, running under the slogan “011, You Have a Call,” is bringing to SOKOJ club from September 24 to 27, while the film program unfolds at the Yugoslav Film Archive and Dorcol Platz. This time, SOKOJ club takes on the role of a place where music history is retold firsthand, through conversations with the people who made it, rather than through a chronicle written in someone else’s words.

Who Is Coming to SOKOJ Club

The order of the four club programs, as they follow one another:

• Friday, September 25, 7:15 PM: a panel on Ljuba Ninkovic, musician, composer, radio host and founder of the bands “S vremena na vreme” and “Tunel.” Participants include band members Vlada Jankovic Dzet, Bilja Krstic, Rodoljub Stojanovic, Milan Djurdjevic and Boda Ninkovic, moderated by Petar Janjatovic.
• Saturday, September 26, 7:30 PM: a panel dedicated to the Serbian rock scene of the 1990s, the first in a series the festival plans to hold about that decade, and at the same time a tribute to Dejan Gvozden, founder and frontman of the band Kristali, who died too young. Speakers include Predrag Novkovic, Zeljko Markus, Miki Ristic of Darkwood Dub, Nenad Pejovic of KKN and Dejan Pejovic of Familija, again moderated by Sandra Rancic.
• Sunday, September 27, 6 PM: the panel on Ivan Piko Stancic.
• Sunday, September 27, 7 PM: the launch of the monograph and vinyl “The Secret of the Old Oak,” dedicated to Milan Manojlovic Manca.

The decision to open the 1990s as a dedicated topic is no small editorial detail, but a modest statement about the festival’s cultural outlook. It was the decade the domestic scene spent cut off from the world by international sanctions, and one that official pop music history here rarely mentions outside of anecdotes about inflation and clips recorded on VHS tape. Kristali, Darkwood Dub, KKN and Familija were not related in sound, but they were related in having formed and survived in that same cramped space, and the panel that brings them under one roof makes a gesture that goes beyond simple reminiscing.

After the conversation, Saturday’s program continues with socializing to the music of the period, courtesy of DJ Uros Milovanovic, so the panel on the 1990s stays open even after the last sentence has been spoken, instead of closing with applause and empty chairs.

Sunday’s launch of “The Secret of the Old Oak” is a different kind of event, closer to the post-Yugoslav context than to the local scene. It is an extensive art box set that brings together Manca’s musical and visual work: the albums “Covjek iz Katange,” “Plavi bar” and “Melodije sobe i predsoblja,” an exclusive seven-inch vinyl titled “Soft Hits for a Soft City” featuring previously unreleased songs, an award-winning art and music monograph, and an original linocut. As part of the Notabook program, editor Kornel Seper, project initiator Emil Tedeski, and painter and comic book author Helena Klakocar will discuss Manca’s work, in a conversation moderated by dramaturg Ivan Velisavljevic.

SOKOJ club also gets a slice of the film program during the festival, even though most of the screenings are held at the Film Archive and Dorcol Platz. On Friday, September 25, starting at 6 PM, the club will screen Cedomir Markovic’s film “Everything Will Be Fine, Maestro Radovan Papovic,” a poetic documentary portrait of one of Montenegro’s most important music educators and conductors. Alongside that title, the audience will also see excerpts from films still in the making: Mladen Maticevic presents his work on Tomo Bebic, titled “Livio from Istria,” while Radislav Jovanov Gonzo shows how far he has gotten with “When I Was 16,” a documentary about the band Psihomodo Pop currently in post-production.

Admission to all SOKOJ club programs is free, and the full schedule of the 11th Dok’n’Ritam is available on the festival’s official website, doknritam.com. For a festival that builds itself on documentation rather than nostalgia, that openness toward audiences without tickets feels like a logical extension of the idea itself: music history is not kept behind glass, it is brought to the table and told out loud.