SHANTEL & BUCOVINA CLUB SOUNDSYSTEM

In the organizer's words:

Partizani Super Sonic Live Tour

Bringing The Full Energy of Club-Culture & Dance Party's Live on Stage. Listen To Diversity. The Analog Meets the Digital. The East Meets the West. A Melting Pot of Styles a Vibrant Spectacle Where the Acoustic Will Be Remixed with Electronica & Beats Live on Stage. Celebrating The Liberty of Performance with Balkan Pop, Global Bass, Diaspora Beats, Turkish Psychedelica and Electro.

With his international mega-hit "Disko Partizani", Shantel became the audible face of a new music and dance culture worldwide. He was the first to give contemporary pop culture a cosmopolitan sound thanks to his multi-layered family roots. With Shantel, migration is audible and danceable. Musical gems from south-eastern Europe, Greece and the Middle East appear in a new, multi-layered context.

Shantel sees his work as a musician as the creative processing of an ongoing discourse between theory and practice. The results, which can be heard, felt and danced to, are always a product of his very individual approach to music as a specific expression of the historical, cultural, social and political soundscape of a place. From the very beginning, his output as a DJ, producer and musician has been situated in the field of tension between tradition + modernity and analog + digital.

Shantel's method does not follow a linear understanding of music as something static, culturally and spatially confined. On the contrary: his own family history and the resulting multi-layered musical socialization made it clear to him early on that music knows no boundaries. This basic idea of combining different musical styles is reflected in all of the artist's projects. The Lissania Essay club that he ran in Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel in the 1980s can be seen as Shantel's own musical expression of not reflecting the mainstream electronic music scene, but rather placing the complexity of new forms and techniques of making music in an overall global context.
Lissiana offered the various urban communities a space that was integrative and diverse instead of a scene - just like all of Shantel's other projects, in which music and club culture always becomes a political practice.

In today's globalized world, in the urbanity in which we live, Shantel does not play and produce the one sound that supposedly originates from one community. Because in a complex world characterized by migration, digital exchange and a dynamic music scene that is constantly spitting out new creative products from seemingly incompatible musical backgrounds, there is no longer a geographically pinned-down, separate, homogeneous sound.

With this understanding, Shantel creates a curatorial approach to global music structures and internationally functioning sounds with albums such as "Disko Partizani" or "Istanbul", which can be understood as an ongoing critique of the Eurocentric pop culture of Western Europe. While migration, subcultures and the music they bring with them have long been an integral part of the lived diversity of cities, the media public still creates a separate system of supposedly homogeneous modern music genres. In particular, "Disko Partizani" and "Istanbul" are lovingly produced albums that were created in a constant musical exchange and show the limits of Western-focused and simplified genre classifications such as "Balkan Beat" and "Oriental Pop".

Instead of understanding music as a dynamic product of historical, social and cultural influences, it becomes static and homogeneous: Music with Greek, Anatolian or southern European sounds, even if it originates in Frankfurt in the heart of Europe, thus still becomes the music of others. According to Shantel, this negation leads to music beyond the European mainstream being made invisible, unless it can be extremely commercialized. Shantel sees his work as a producer, musician and DJ as a declaration of war against the existing social dominance structures and the assumption that only those who can maintain a clear separation between the sound "here" and the sound "there" can be successful in the mainstream.