Episodes #1 – #10 Episodes #11 – #20 Episodes #20 – #31

Duga Nota (The Long Note) is a radio show aired every fourth Saturday from 9 to 11 PM at the Yammat.fm radio station in Zagreb, Croatia. The show is actually a musical rendition of the manuscript for the book Duga Nota (The Long Note) I’ve written during 2018 and 2019, to be published in 2021. Every episode is a loose interpretation of the content of a single chapter in the book.

Below are the links to all of the Duga nota episodes aired at the Yammat.fm radio thus far. Yammat.fm uploads the shows to their channel at the MixCloud platform where they are directly searchable under its name (Duga nota) or by my own name (Mladen Vukmir DUGA NOTA). Duga Nota project is easiest to reach via its dedicated web page where all relevant links can be found. Other information regarding the project (either the book or the radio show) can be found on the FB page Duga Nota. I also post the playlists for each of the episodes as text in the comments to its MixCloud uploads.

I will be adding the links here below as the shows are made available by the radio station. I will be accompanying each link below with a link to the Apple music playlist I create in the preparations for each episode. For some of the shows, there will be significantly more tracks in the playlist than aired so you can explore and enjoy more music. Those bonus tracks are the songs I have considered in preparing the shows, but could not be squeezed into the two-hour format.

I will be also posting the summaries that I prepare for each episode as it is posted on the Stražarni lopov blog. The summaries are also partially available in the MixCloud descriptions posted by the radio station. This blog post is intended to reach English-speaking listeners, so all the summaries are translated into English.  

If your intuition tells you that there might be second meanings and hidden clues in the way I have selected and juxtaposed the music for the shows, then they’re probably are! Indeed, I do play not only with my own memories and toss the associations between the musicians, songs, and the times in which they were created! However, not all of those combinations are mentioned explicitly, nor do I lay out the clues for you in all of the instances. Indeed, I actively seek links and coincidences, overlapping influences, and other mysterious, almost holographic occurrences between the songs we listen to in the show. Therefore, please go and seek the hidden flows which might even further enhance your enjoying all of the music in the show.

Finally, although the radio show is conducted in the Croatian language, Duga nota is first and foremost a music program, and music dominates spoken segments by far. Only segments from the book read by Robert Šantek, Dubravk Bratoljić, and Antonija Vrčić can be longer more than a couple of minutes. I, therefore, trust that all of you can enjoy it as it is played, regardless of the language. An American friend, keen on music, said after listening to the show: Mladen – Speaking honestly, that’s one of the best rock and roll radio programs I’ve ever heard – truly great selection of tunes – really wide range of stuff. Now if I only could understand Croatian.

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You have heard the opening jingle of the show: Duga nota! Glazba kojom smo mijenjali sebe i pokrenuli promjenu koja traje. Kako smo postali duga, ostali mladi i druge priče. Duga nota; autor i voditelj Mladen Vukmir. Samo na 102 sve 5! and might wonder what it all means? It is a poetic abbreviation of the book’s concept and it roughly translates as: “Long Note! Music by which we have transformed ourselves and have started a lasting change. How did we become a rainbow (in the Croatian language the word for long and for rainbow are written the same way, allowing for this wordplay), remained young, and other stories. Long Note: author and host Mladen Vukmir. Exclusively at one-o-two all five!” (instead of point five, as all five is Croatian slang for OK)!

Should you wish to learn about how the title Duga Nota was born and what it really means, please feel free to read this blog post.

Further episodes #11-#20 and #21-#30 are posted on the new blog posts.

Following are the MixCloud links to the episodes of the show:

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Episode 10 Peaceful Earth (Mirna Zemlja): “Sentiš” is a Croatian word for ballads, slow songs intended to transmit delicate emotions, bodies close together in an affectionate dance of persons seeking love. While in English these songs are called ballads, the word “sentiš”, a slang derivative of the word sentimental, seems to better describe the cultural role of such music. Slow rhythm, peace, and intense sensibility are characteristics of music that have meant a lot to young people. As if they are batteries, the compositions retain the peaceful sensitivity of the kind that has disappeared to this day. Perhaps if we delve deep enough into this music, it is possible to reconstruct the peace that has evaporated somewhere in the meantime. In the tenth episode of the Duga nota show, called Peaceful Earth, we included those songs whose sentiments directly depict the peace that existed in the 1960s and 1970s, and which disappeared in the synthetic and hectic 1980s, and was completely dried out by the advent of the Internet in the 1990s. Some of the compositions are there to illustrate peace and others the sensuality, although in reality all of the songs I have played actually contain one and the other components of the spirit of the times, which have disappeared as we grew up. Slow down and sink into the music.

Apple Music Playlist – Mirna Zemlja (Peaceful Earth) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 9 Šentilj (Border crossing): Black music is the basis of rock music, and the idioms of jazz, blues, and rap form the backbone of a cultural upheaval that elevated both black and white music to the status of the most significant social movement of the twentieth century. The interweaving of blues, rock, rap, and jazz has taken place in many locations, at various unexpected moments that we will seek to illustrate throughout the ninth episode of the Long Note radio show. Black Sabbath’s music is deeply rooted in blues, a feature that was missed by most of the fans who haven’t followed them since their first album. Their interest in jazz from the time they played as Earth did last until their last album with Ozzy. We will illustrate what a tremendous impact that has had on younger musicians, both white and especially black, in a series of songs in which hip-hop, rap, and DJ performers have paid tribute to this influence by sampling Black Sabbath songs. Unexpected role changes, such as the one in which African-American jazz singer Cassandra Wilson sings a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell called Black Crow, which is in the original recording played by white jazz virtuoso Jaco Pastorius on bass, and whose version of Paul McCartney and Beatles’ cover song Blackbird we will listen are but some examples of the racial inversions that characterize twentieth-century music culture. Finally, the Black Sabbath concerts I first saw with my friends as a sixteen-year-old and the one I saw with my sixteen-year-old son are a circle that closed at the Šentilj border crossing I used to cross as a communist country citizen afraid of police and customs controls, and the open Schengen border between EU member states symbolically symbolizes the role of rock in creating free societies in Europe.

Apple Music Playlist 9 Šentilj (Border Crossing) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 8 Bangs and Split (Šiške i razdjeljak): Bangs and Split is an episode dedicated to prog music, which intrigued me enough to start listening to it as a kid. I simultaneously loved it and neglected it due to my interest in other music directions, primarily hard rock and psychedelia. A friend I met at Big Ben disco club was a big fan, and when he invited me home to listen to the albums of the prog bands he loved, I was pleased. Indeed, on this occasion, I learned a lot about bands and records that I had not listened to before. I remember the occasion primarily after one short episode in which I realized that members of the rock counterculture were not really different from people who belonged to conservative culture. Specifically, during our listening, the question arose as to why I was wearing my long hair with bangs, while apparently in the prog scene, in the opinion of a friend of mine, they needed to wear their hair to the partition. Although I remember this story on the realization that people who are considered liberal are potentially just as intolerant as conservative people, the music itself inspired me. I conceived this episode musically by playing a radio program. I joked in preparation that it was a pop track, to which a friend who loved the prog replied that it was a perfect contradiction. Hopefully, listeners who know less about prog rock will therefore find it more accessible. Whichever way you turn it, the heavenly beauty of this music will surprise you, especially if you think that prog is about nerdy macho overplaying and needlessly complex musical expressions.

Apple Music Playlist – Šiške i razdjeljak (Bangs and Split) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 7 Home in Enchanted Forrest (Domaći u Čudnoj šumi): Home in Enchanted Forest is an episode dedicated to the fifth chapter of the book Duga nota (Long Note), in which I reminisce on the time of my discovery of local rock music. Domaći is best translated as Domestics (rather than Home) and they are mythical literary creatures introduced by the writer Ivana Brlić Mažuranić in her fables, and Čudna šuma is an early song by YU Grupa which showed me how powerful local rock can be. Like a deer that first saw the reflection of its eyes on the placid surface of the lake, many kids, after exploding enthusiasm for worldwide, mostly English or American rock, shyly spotted local people, neighbors, and fellow citizens playing rock music in the garages and clubs down the street. There were a lot of bands around the corner, and best of all, they sounded just as good as their idols. Even if they did not have such good equipment or have had as much experience as foreign bands, they compensated for it by being close and talking about recognizable problems and fantasies. The rock scene of the former federation where we grew up was unusually rich, and inspired, and the scope of production was enormous. Let’s listen to some of the bigger hits and some of the deeper cuts from that remarkable period.

Apple Music Playlist – Domaći u Čudnoj šumi (Home in Enchanted Forrest) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 6 Sur, sura, sundari: Music-wise this is my model show, a blend of genres and geographical diversity of music shows how far music can take you. Sur, sura, sundari is Sanskrit for music, women, and wine. In rock music, we used to refer to this same hendiatris as sex, drugs, and rock and roll. All three are only describing the human celebration of creative and bodily pleasures. For those who like to look for hidden clues in my shows, I can hint that this episode evokes also the mythologization of rock history, which inasmuch it is childish, is an endearing feature of the counterculture. I have played the music by the rock holy and unholy trinities, the apex of the pyramid of the rock pantheon while acknowledging that each and every rock fan will have their own trinity of the rock’s greatest. From Indian music to jazz-rock, via folk, blues, and rock this episode of Duga nota is all about music. Enjoy!

Apple Music Playlist – Sur, sura, sundari (Music, Women, Wine) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 5 Dry Ice: Flashing reflectors, mightily loud PA, naked torsos, and long hair sticky from sweat were to be glimpsed through the smoke. The very first concert I saw live in my life predetermined me to love rock music. The Suhi led chapter recalls the sheer power of stage presence which only a few in our generation were able to resist. This was a period of rock culture when the audience participated in the concerts together with the bands, and in which the live albums were recorded so as to capture this participation by the audience. In the fifth episode of the Duga nota show, we listen to the live albums from the period of a most intense period of rock music influencing and determining the social currents. These happen to be the albums that have recorded some of the greatest moments of live rock music.

Apple Music Playlist – Suhi led (Dry Ice) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 4 Distortion: Distorzija is a chapter of the Duga nota book in which I recall the first single records that had a strong effect in pulling me into rock music’s spell and have apparently predestined me for love of distorted sound. Today, I understand that the musicians, by using distortion thought us all that using deconstruction and destruction is the most pleasurable way to go about reconstructing social relations. This became clear from their own methods of sound destruction which achieved passion and novelty. The geography of rock saw a brief homage to the capital of distortion – Detroit.

Apple Music Playlist – Distorzija (Distortion) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 3 Drums, basses, bombs: Bubnjevi, basevi, bombe is the first chapter of the Duga nota book. In the show’s third episode we listen to a fast-forward (hi)story of rock. From the very outset of the Twentieth century it was easily visible that, unlike the European elite forms of pictorial and sculptural, musical and theater art, this new culture based on African music is profoundly popular. These popular new music formats, spreading out New Orleans throughout the USA, and soon afterward, in the American bombs’ footsteps in the Second World War, gave rise to a music-powered culture that started spreading all over the World. This culture, however, remained strongly tied to its roots in popular culture and as such, has successfully reached many more people, most of them young members of the baby boom generation. In this show we only listen not only to the history of rock, we also explore its geography by visiting New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz and rock music.

Apple Music Playlist – Bubnjevi, basevi, bombe (Drums, basses, bombs) Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 2 Zoom: The prologue of the Duga nota book called Zoom asks the question of whether rock holds any future and, if so, what could it be? The second episode of the show, with music from Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, and Elton John, tries to triangulate the past, the present, and the future of rock, seeking an answer to this question. Along the way, we discover that very often, the epic and imposing structure of rock stems out of the simplicity and very basic elements, so that the melodramatic grandeur often achieved is not that far removed from the humble simplicity of the blues that actually also encompasses it.

Apple Music Playlist – Zoom Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Episode 1 Bluebook: The first episode, entitled Bluebook took us back to the present of 1974. and 1975, when the kids plugged in almost two decades of the history of rock through heavy metal, prog, and glam rock and started exploring the rock counterculture. We have also visited a hospital where we found aging kids still hooked on rock music. A lot of memories surge back when we peek into our youth and some songs still hold a lot of meaning almost half a century after we heard them for the very first time. Bluebook is the episode retelling the introduction to the Duga nota book by music. The first two minutes and 30 seconds are a spoken dedication to the late Alen Balen who died on the eve of the show’s original launch date of March 30. This was pushed for a week in the wake of this tragedy and the show launched on April 6, 2019.

Apple Music Playlist – Bluebook Join the FB page Duga nota.

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I hope this picture of myself and Bota (to my left, i.e. to your right) at Džamija approx. 1976, close to our high school, shows how much we were part of the rock culture. Not only it is visible here, it is almost palpable. It is actually not that we were part of the counterculture. We were counterculture. I sewed the round yellow Woodstock patch onto my jeans jacket myself. The photo was taken by Leo Knežić and we are apparently watching someone playing guitar.

Join the FB page Duga nota.

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Finally, I have been invited as a guest DJ to a 20:02 program at the Yammat.fm radio some six months before I have started the Duga nota show. I did, however, already hold a similar approach and have selected some deep cuts from the contemporary rhythm and blues scene. I hope you will enjoy that too as it is one of my favorite playlists:

Apple Music Playlist – 20:02 G(h)ost DJ Mladen Vukmir

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Further episodes #11 – #20 are posted on the new blog post and #21-#31.

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