Over the last year and a half, I’ve been researching, reviewing, and documenting music from the former Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans, mostly for my site. It essentially started by accident when I was introduced to EX-YU music by my now-fiancée. This was a world I was completely new to at the time, and I felt I needed a place to document that discovery.
The first reviews were the obvious entry points: Azra, Haustor, EKV, and Bijelo Dugme. But the deeper I went, the more curious I became, and I realised I was building a place to document the stuff nobody else in English seemed to be covering at all. Macedonian goth rock, Rijeka punk, and Prishtina’s present-day underground; these were albums that, as far as I could tell, had never had a single English-language sentence written about them.
But somewhere in that process, I ran into the same problem over and over again. Balkan releases were scattered everywhere: a compilation on Spotify, some singles on YouTube, a poor-quality recording on SoundCloud, sometimes only on Discogs, sometimes only on a cassette or a piece of vinyl that never made it online at all. Time and again I stumbled upon something I considered genuinely good, and then lost track of it completely.
And even when I could find the music, I couldn’t find anyone talking about it. No reviews, no context, barely any discourse in English at all. I’d finish an album with a dozen questions, and there was no one to talk to and nowhere to look.
It’s worth noting for context that by day I’m a software engineer, working on this alongside a full-time job, and I’ve always loved building websites. One day I got thinking about how I could merge my expertise with my passion, and it struck me that I could build a music database, a tool for discussing and exploring Balkan music. This would be a place where you could find all the info you need about a record: artist, label, release date, genre(s), city/country of origin, credits, all in one place…
That’s what archive.exyumusic.org is. A searchable, community-built archive of ex-Yugoslav and Balkan releases. You can browse by artist, genre, or user-created lists, rate and review records, and see what other people are listening to, keeping in their collection, or hoping to track down next.
It’s early days. At the time of writing, the site is only a few weeks old, sitting at a few hundred releases and ratings, with a small handful of real people actually using it regularly. But just a few days after launch, people already started contributing releases: the entire Električni orgazam discography, obscure punk and emo, and someone has even started adding a bunch of Kosovo releases, bearing in mind this is a region whose music history is especially thin online… It’s immediately obvious that this tool can be something extremely useful.
So if you’re interested, come have a look. You don’t need to sign up to explore the site, and everything is totally free (with no ads). If you’d like to rate, review, and contribute an album, then you are more than welcome to by signing up using Google. Go search for a band you love and see what’s there. If something’s missing, add it. Contributions go into a quick review queue rather than appearing instantly, but it’s a real person on the other end moderating submissions, not a black box. If you find a bug or have a feature request, then send me a note.
I’m far from finished. Realistically, the archive won’t ever be complete; instead, I see it as a living, breathing organism that is constantly growing and evolving over time, alongside our music scene.
But the infrastructure is there, the community is growing, and every person who adds something is helping a fellow music lover on their own journey. This is not my archive; it’s ours.
Find your favourite album at archive.exyumusic.org!
