Programata

With his 4.45 words a minute speed, he is unofficially faster than Eminem, but that is not what is important - the music by this Brighton born and raised grime guru is raw energy that sprints through genres with punching lyrics. Before we feel its power live at Terminal 1, four fans are preping us with the tracks, with which they dive deep into Ocean Wisdom.

BROND is fire. Loud, expressive and fueled with the energy of a summer blaze, the four-piece band has just dropped its first album Graveyard Campfire.

They often call him "Sting's guitarist", but in parallel with this 30-year tandem, Dominic Miller haven't stopped making his own music. Shortly after the release of their Ten Summoner's Tales (including Shape of my Heart, whose story we hear below), in 1995 he released his first solo album First Touch, which he recorded in his living room surrounded by his children (to date - six).

He's been jumping from one extreme to another for as long as we've known him - from the scandolous underground start with Hipodil, to the commercial top with Skakauetz and the serious run through politics to the crazy present with The Legends.

When she first appeared on stage to sing Violetta's aria from Verdi's Traviata, she did not even know how to bow. Only a year later she was already Lucia di Lammermoor in Bilbao, and for the next 30 years her voice was heard in the largest operas from Vienna, Berlin, Turin and Monte Carlo to Moscow, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv and Paris (where she lives with her daughters most of the time).

If your guitar can move anyone without even saying a word, then you speak all languages. This is what we think when listening to Vlatko Stefanovski's music - the Macedonian has 35 albums (14 of them - with Leb and Sol) and his last one Mother tongue gathers musical acoustic versions of Macedonian folk songs that "fly across borders and become a common culture" Shortly before they land at Sofia Live Club on 30th of March, we wait for Vlako to pick up the phone in Skopje to find a common language with us for a few questions: from the first guitar to the most important advice he has ever received (and, as we think, applies to everyone).

There is something, I feel it in the air… we're singing Away by Gravity Co. and inhaling the snowballs that the band's frontman has brought for us as an excuse for his coming late to our meeting. But it is really OK - we can wait a few minutes more, when after a few long years Yavor Zahariev, Iva Chalakov, Peter Samnaliev and Stefan Popov are about to restart their history with two live concerts at Terminal 1.

Shouting or whispering, every year fills our memories with echos with its stories.

Before the experimental trio takes us off with a sound from Copenhagen at City Stage on November 23rd, four people from the audience play their own setlist and explain to us who makes them listen to WhoMadeWho.

They often call her "David Lynch's muse". With good reason. Christa Bell would steal anyone's heart even if he hadn't directed the Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., but her creative relationship with Lynch is something special. We had listened to her voice long before it came out in the new episodes of Twin Peaks, but her debut album, We Dissolve, finally took over us. Its exciting that we will hear it live at Sofia Live Club on November 17th, and even more so - that before that, Christa manages to answer some important questions about music, cinema, funerals and, of course, David, as she calls him.

His favourite Bulgarian writer is Elin Pelin but we put him in Yordan Yovkov's title because it sounds more like him.

We meet meters away from his Boogie Exchange vinyl shop and immediately set up our conversation around them. Of course we do - Yordan (a.k.a. The Beer, but above all as Ramsey Hercules) is a DJ with a quater-century experience from here to Amsterdam, the guy behind the online boogie.fm radio, freelance saxophonist and encyclopedia for music questions (just try him). There are many reasons to talk to him, but today we are here for a specific one - the beginning of the season in Yalta club, which prepares a series of big disco parties with Ramsey and Discopigg Yoshida behind the plaque. The first one is on Oct. 14, and if the superpower of their sets haven't reached you, just play these songs.

A month before their concert in Arena Armeec on October 27, Bosnian dub/hip-hop/ska masters Dubioza Kolektiv came to Sofia for an unexpected club event and even an unexpected performance in the middle of Vitoshka street. We also managed to catch them and on the same day we meet with DJ Brano Jakubovic and the bassist Vedran Mujagic for a quick glass of rakia, a conversation about their new (still nameless) album and a few vicious curses in the direction of Donald Trump and Slobodan Milosevic.

He managed to play some music for us from Vienna just before coming to Plovdiv for One Dance Week with his new group performance Sculptures. The basis for it is his first studio album with the same name, which he rouses with  choreography to escape from the microphone stand. Not that he had stood for a long time in front of her. In fact, he hasn't stood anywhere - he has more than 30 performances in contemporary art spaces from Barcelona and Berlin to New York and Sao Paulo. We are happy, however, that we can see and hear them often here in Sofia. But now listen to something else - how Ivo Dimchev plays his own stuff in this playlist.

Since we heard him live again last fall (getting lucky to have a ticket at all), we think of what he's listening to when he's not on stage. We now ask him personally just a week before his concert in Apollonia festival (in the same musical combo with Ivo Chalakov, Vassil Voutev, Petar Slamaliev and the passionate vocalists Elena Sirakova and Katia Krasteva).

It's inevitable. Every time we talk to Nikolai and Ruslan, we talk about music, but most often it's about the songs played in their Wrong Bar, the bands they've invited for a concert in Mixtape 5 or what they're preparing for the next Wrong Fest. Shortly before his first episode this year in the Maimunarnika (following the outback at the Voynegovtsi in September), our conversation with them is a bit different - we walk with them back and forth in time to find out what they are crying for, who makes them drink rakia and who tells them "good night."

When she picks up the handset on the other side, Patricia Kaas is in a Czech hotel and she is going to have a concert tonight. Her voice is dense and low, the same as when she sings, and we unwittingly imagine everything on her side black and white, with a few chords getting out of the piano in the room.

A few weeks ago we rushed in Friday at 5 sharp to get ourselves some quick humour with the two season of the YouTube show. That's when we came across Address to the nation - a video which redirected us to an Indiegogo campaign that is raising money for season 3. 

We are learning how to pronounce his name so that we could shout it out loud on April 7 when the rapper/producer is coming to Sofia Live Club with his Beneath The Surface Tour and now - straight out of the concert's fan zone - we're bringing forth four guys to explain to us why Oddisee is top. Here's the songs that they convinced us with that the rapper doesn't need his music to be banging from the speakers at every other club to be awesome.

His music-playing machine is on YouTube since 2009 but its fans are piling up since 2012 when he uploaded A Motown Tribute to Nickelback - a mix of the band's rock hits, transformed into 60's r'n'b.