Croatian label Fox & His Friends was born in 2017 out of Leri Ahel and Željko Luketić’s obsession with disco and obscure electronics, their predilection for crate digging and a desire to salvage and reanimate long forgotten Yugoslav musics. As a result, the label’s catalogue is varied and spans across genres – oddball pop, seductive funk, electroacoustic experiments, electronic rock and everything in-between – connected by the neglect and ridicule that welcomed them originally, the dust that covered them in the decades since and the hidden histories they uncover. While their releases are available digitally, the label’s format of choice remains vinyl packaged with great attention to detail and extensive liner notes.

Tomislav Simović
“In Impossible Situations We Turn Back Time”
From Visitors From The Galaxy (2017)

While Yugoslavia nurtured a fairly accomplished film industry, Dušan Vukotić’s Visitors From The Galaxy (1981) was one of only a few science fiction features it produced. The Oscar-winning director’s vision of the genre was extravagant and progressive, which in turn allowed him to populate his camp storyline with offbeat human characters and biomechanical extraterrestrial creatures modelled by Jan Švankmajer. Composer Tomislav Simović’s electronic score followed suit in style, feeling and absurdity. His mesmerising cues such as “In Impossible Situations…” open with simple motifs and faux orchestral segments, but soon devolve into abstract bleeps, pulses, disorienting effects and horror-like ambience that sound as if they had just escaped from Ina-GRM. Although they have regularly published more accessible music, this was a daring first release that has since served as a statement of intent for Fox & His Friends.

Dubravka Jusić
“Stani, Stani”
From Socialist Disco: Dancing Behind Yugoslavia's Velvet Curtain 1977-1987 (2018)

Disco as a form was often labelled ‘kuruza’ in Yugoslavia. Meaning literally ‘corn’, it was a term used to deride art of supposedly lower value made for the masses. While the musicians and songwriters involved would later come to renounce the music, these tracks, their queerness and the democratising potential of disco floors form a staple of Fox & His Friends’s publishing efforts. This compilation explores the fringes of the genre, collecting quirky one-offs into a curiously cohesive, beguiling whole. Dubravka Jusić’s assertive romp “Stani, Stani” is one of its standouts, the singer’s silky voice soaring over spacey synth rays, pumping bass repetitions and incisive drum rolls.

Alfi Kabiljo
“Moderate Motion (Theme from Slow Motion)”
From Sex, Crime & Politics: Cinematic Disco, Jazz & Electronica From Yugoslavia 1974-1984 (2019)

Primarily known for his musicals and chansons, Alfi Kabiljo composed innumerable other works, from ballets to functional music – such as the workout pieces featured on Yu Aerobic – that didn’t quite fit the composer’s public image. In these peculiarities where mainstream interest fades, Fox & His Friends begins. More than just a compilation, Sex, Crime & Politics is a re-contextualisation of Kabiljo’s scores for several Yugoslav films in the form of a thrilling and sexy new musical narrative. Here, “Moderate Motion”, the theme from Vanča Kljaković’s Slow Motion (1979), becomes the album’s archetype: a steamy funk and melancholy jazz affair supported by swirls of strings, flutes, Fender Rhodes textures and wah-wahed guitar.

NEP
“Velika Magija”
From Pop Not Pop (Songs For New Europe 1983-1989) (2020)

Dejan Kršić’s multimedia collective NEP (Nova Evropa) was imagined as a force of disruption that was to shake up the theoretical foundation of Zagreb’s art scene under the influence of pop art, Fluxus and other more or less radical movements of the time. In this context, music served both an autopoietic and functional purpose, as accompaniment for installations and performances. Divided into two halves, Pop Not Pop features several originals in multiple versions along with a deconstruction of Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europa Express”. The album’s first half is home to stomping songs that drip with darkwave grime, while the second dives into peculiar bubblegum pop. Taken from that first part, “Velika Magija” combines Einstürzende Neubauten’s idea of scuzzy experimental industrial with haunted spoken word fragments and unsettling folk tinges for great effect.

Tomislav Simović
“To Turn Back Time (Anatolian Weapons Love Mix)”
From Visitors From The Galaxy Revisited (2021)

In an effort to bridge the past and the present, Fox & His Friends provided an extended set of samples, stems and sounds from Tomislav Simović’s Visitors From The Galaxy score for a select group of composers, producers and DJs to reimagine as they saw fit. The resulting music has a dark and heavy dancefloor vibe, with the two remixes by Dutch producer Drvg Cvltvre dropping especially low. But the compilations most alluring moments are found in tracks which emphasise the warmth and empathy buried in the source material. Aggelos Baltas alias Anatolian Weapons’s “To Turn Back Time (Love Mix)” is spectacular in this sense, with lush synth pads, foggy background fabric and echoing vocal bits summoning Jamal Moss’s transcendent Chicago house and Andy Stott’s ghostly techno.

Nenad Vilović
“Nebula”
From Prizma (2022)

Within the context of Yugoslav and Croatian pop music, songwriter and producer Nenad Vilović is primarily known as a mainstream hitmaker whose inclination towards lighter notes and commercially viable forms gained infamy in purist circles. However, his true artistic interests lay elsewhere, as can be heard on Prizma. Originally recorded in 1985, but ignored by labels and shelved since then, the album channels Vilović’s admiration of Jean-Michel Jarre, idiosyncratic film scores, electronic music and disco into a space prog rock opera laden with analogue synth textures and spaghetti western atmosphere. “Nebula” is particularly affecting, as its spiral of plaintive strings, expansive, fuzzy synth stabs and sparse acoustic guitar phrases evokes an idealistic fusion of 1980s aesthetics, from John Carpenter and Giorgio Moroder to Ennio Morricone.

Tomislav Simović
“The Dream (1982)”
From The Zagreb School Of Animated Film (Original Soundtracks 1961-1982) (2023)

A significant part of Tomislav Simović’s oeuvre is occupied by music for films that belonged to the Zagreb school of animation. His scores reflect the films’ avant-garde visual aesthetic and non-traditional structures, which stood in stark contrast to the 1950s and 1960s output of studios like Disney, with similarly daring, intricate electroacoustic compositions. On “The Dream”, from the eponymous 1982 animation, the appearance of a soprano and her scat-like inflection transforms bubbly, xylophone-haunted synthetic soundscapes into an unnerving, minimal aria and one of the most striking compositions here.

Read more about Fox & His Friends in The Wire 468. Wire subscribers can also read the magazine online via the digital library.