You could be forgiven for not immediately thinking of
Bulgaria when asked to contemplate the world’s leading party spots.
Lodged between Romania, Serbia, and the Black Sea, the Bulgarian
government under Communist rule forbade sexual, and most forms of
artistic, expression. But after the Iron Curtain tumbled, Western pop
culture flooded into the country just as countless Bulgarians fled to
Western Europe and America, as the country began to experience a long
overdue cultural and creative revolution.
Joro-Boro was one of the ones who got out. After spending much of
the ’90s collecting cassettes by artists like Laurie Anderson and
Siouxsie and the Banshees in Bulgaria, Joro-Boro came to the States,
eventually winding up in New York. There, he hooked up with a community
of young Balkan immigrants at the Mehanata Bulgarian Bar. Mehanata was
originally just a restaurant, but as it became more and more popular
with Bulgarian youth, it began booking bands and adding regular DJs,
including Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz and Joro-Boro. Spinning boozy
Balkan brass tunes with punk tracks and gypsy rhythms, Mehanata soared
in popularity until Eastern European regulars complained that it had
become too popular with New York hipsters. (Perhaps the club’s “Get
naked: free shot; Get fucked: free bottle” policy had something to do
with its popularity.)
Among the music that Joro-Boro helped popularize at Mehanata was
chalga, a drum machine-heavy, urbanized form of Balkan folk. A
raw dance music with special emphasis on sex and drinking, chalga has
drawn comparisons to the brash street style of Brazil’s baile funk.
Imagine Bonde do Rolê with slamming accordions and tambourines
mixed in with their bass-laden synth beats, and you’ve got something
close to chalga.
This weekend, Joro-Boro hits Portland to drop nonstop Balkan jams
all over the dancefloor at Atlas, the dance night dedicated to
delivering contemporary dance music from all over the non-Western
world. Aside from the guys in Gogol Bordello, nobody represents the
dirty party rhythms of the Eastern Bloc like Joro-Boro. So if you want
to hear what happens to a country when you deprive it of sexual and
musical expression for decades, and then suddenly turn it loose,
Holocene is your place to be this Saturday night.