Easterndaze: Ikonal – Cro Dance Mix

Please welcome my dear friend from Croatia. ~ Nikola Kos aka Ikonal. Very talented electronic music producer and grassroot acitivist from Zagreb. He is creating melodic music for the dance floor on Elektron machines and enjoying performing it live. Part of bRAve crew which throws the best parties in town!

Some time ago I also did little inteview with Nikola

JB: Can you tell us a little bit about your musical background?

NK: I am a black sheep from a family of classical musicians. In my early age I wanted to play drums, but parents signed me up for a violin classes. It was boring for me to rehearse and reproduce someone else’s musical creation, especially because my dad was professional viola player, and had high expectations on me. I don’t need to tell you how happy they were when I told them that I found my cause of existence in electronic music. As teenagers we started to hang out in a garage playing with hardware synths. Few years after, we were kind of pushed to make something from our synth-pop project called How Convinient. It was hard for me to pack music that I wanted to make into something convenient for masses, so after few years I started solo project Ikonal and started to perform it live. For me it was the breakpoint when i finally understood that I don’t have to be another ( put your favorite artist name here) and that the only that matters is to believe in what you do, and to do what you believe in.

JB: What is bRave? What is your mission and ethics?

NK: After years of waiting somebody to make things “right” we finally realised the only way to make things better is to try making them yourself. Few musicians Le Chocolat Noir, Zarkoff, Ikonal and one young DJ Maja Pa formed bRAVE collective and started to organise events in Zagreb. During last few years, dozens of events, some workshops and jams, we are constantly rethinking what we are, and what is our role in this weird society.
After few years, we can easily say, the crowd here is more open than most promoters.
It is so easy for people to feel the difference, if you do event with heart.

JB: How would you describe Croatian underground music landscape now?

NK: Lot of people like to say they are underground, but mostly selling that ethics to the crowds. For me being underground is the way you treat your audience, not doing only what they will like for sure, but presenting different approaches of making music for people to lose their minds.
It is not in selling tickets. It is in not selling bellives. We can say Croatian scene is on a second peak of the raveing hype. There are many promoters j
umping on that train, but mostly inviting artist that will bring them crowds, for me that is not relevant for the evolution of Croatian Electronic Music Scene. We will see what future brings, but I am glad that I know some people that are doing their best to make things more diverse.

JB: Please tell us a bit about artists you have included in your mix for us!

NK: There is so much music here, you just need to ask people around for it. I managed to collect around 100 tracks, from over 30 musicians, in just few days. So I made a mix of tracks that I would play in clubs. Many of them are unknown to promoters, bloggers and clickbaits, but in my opinion some of them are future of the scene here, because they are doing it from heart.
Thank you for invitation and opportunity to make the mix and thanks to everybody that send me some music. It was so fun and easy, i suggest other djs to try play local music too.