About
Between Sound & Shadow
Ivan Tranquilla Tarle has been one of the key figures of domestic pop culture for decades. As the founder and editor of the legendary Yu Rock Magazine from 1993 to 1997, he was a witness and chronicler of the most exciting moments of the regional music scene.
Prigušeni Balkan / Low Light Balkan is an album born from a desire to rescue traditional songs from across the former Yugoslavia from oblivion — and to restore, through contemporary production, the space in which what they carry can be heard again. Lyrics that once bore the weight of life, love and loss are today often heard in passing, without pausing on their meaning. The album is an attempt to return that weight to them.
Fourteen songs. Twelve are traditional texts in entirely new original arrangements and melodies: Bosnian sevdalinkas, a Dalmatian ballad, a Slovenian folk song, Serbian and Vlach traditionals. Two are original compositions — Ispod kože grada and Ustani Jovane. The lyrics are taken in their original form, with all their Turkish loanwords, regional expressions and religious references. Tradition here is not a reference or an ethno ornament; it is raw material.
The production works through trip-hop structures, downtempo arrangements, sub-bass and an atmosphere built around the voice. The songs carry centuries; the production carries the present.
Ivan is a media author whose career traces the transformation of media in the region over the past thirty years. After the magazine, he worked as a pre-press designer, studied TV directing, managed and edited Radio Kontakt in Zemun, then founded his own production house where his work received awards.
His work has always gone hand in hand with technology — from the first home computers of the eighties, through early PC platforms for design and music, to today's systems and AI tools. Technology was never a fashionable addition; it was a working tool that changed alongside the media he worked in.
Prigušeni Balkan is the moment in which that work comes together into one complete authorial expression — as an album, as an audio-visual project, as a story unfolding through stories, reels and posts on social media, all in the same language. The album is recorded and mixed in a Cubase 15.2 setup and Ableton Live environment, which simultaneously serves as the live performance platform.
Prigušeni Balkan is not a nostalgic work. It is an album about what remains of language, memory and belonging after decades of Yugoslavia's dissolution, transition and personal loss — and about the voices that, through all of it, survived in song.
