Serbian Musicians Battle The Coronavirus Blues

Belgrade, Aug 8 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 8th Aug, 2020 ) :In a studio embedded deep inside an old Belgrade printing factory turned artists' space, the rock group Dingospo Dali rehearses for a show they are not sure will come to pass.

Like musicians around the world, the group's plans have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, which has silenced the concert scene in Serbia and thrown Balkan artists into an even more precarious existence.

"I lost a lot of work, as a musician and also as a sound engineer," Nikola Vidojevic, the band's 33-year-old drummer, told AFP.

"The pandemic stopped everything." The six rockers still jam in their studio in the former BIGZ printing and publishing house on the Sava river which has become a mecca for independent musicians and artists in the Serbian capital.

Built in the 1930s, the building housed one of the largest printing works in the region before Yugoslavia's collapse.

Over the past 15 years, its rooms have been reclaimed as a hub for independent rock and alternative art.

Music wafts through the building's huge network of graffiti-streaked hallways, with rooms occupied by dozens of bands, nightclubs and art studios, helping cut the loneliness of the pandemic.

But today the moody neon-lit corridors carry a new heaviness, with many artists now in dire financial straits.

"Most of the tens of thousands of musicians in Serbia have no other source of income than music," said Nikola Jovanovic, owner of a music publishing house and concert organiser.