After pioneering the concept of Balkan clubbing with his now-legendary Bucovina Club parties and albums, Shantel moved on to the next level and released Disko Partizani! in 2007, which lays the foundations for an innovative new brand of pop music. This is the sound of new Europe, centered in the middle of our old continent, but incorporating vibrant influences from the emerging new frontier which stretches all the way to Mitteleuropa, the south east, Greece, Turkey and beyond…

"Disko Partizani!" caught on immediately,  with club & radio favourites such as its anthemic title track (a singalong hit across Europe with a video that’s become a YouTube sensation, 3 million views and counting!) as well as follow-up smash “Disko Boy”. Shantel and his mighty Bucovina Club Orkestar went on to play over 250 shows across Europe, turning clubs, concert halls and festivals into temporary autonomous zones of pure, delirious fun.

With "Planet Paprika", the awaited follow-up to "Disko Partizani!", Shantel raises the temperature level by a serious handful of degrees...



Background

With their organic mix of South-European & Balkan music and club-friendly electronics, Shantel's Bucovina Club nights revolutionized the music scene and became an instant success: tired of dancing over and over again to the sound of usual club fodder, audiences of all ages and origins were conquered by the vitality and excitement of these electro/Balkan mixtures. Shantel started playing clubs, parties and rock festivals around the world, and inevitably drove crowds to ecstatic bliss. We're not talking about innocuous, politically-correct, silly folk dance classes here: whether he Djs or plays live with a band, Shantel has the knack for turning any venue into a vortex of pure euphoria, where people end up stage-diving, belly dancing, and generally going mad… In other words, he's simply brought the Balkans to clubland, and his work soon inspired a whole generation of DJs who turned away from house, techno or breakbeats to embrace this new sound. The nail was further hit on the head with Shantel's standard-setting remixes of tracks by the likes of Taraf de Haïdouks and Mahala Raï Banda (created for Crammed's Electric Gypsyland remix series which, coincidentally, was initiated around the same time), with his production work for Mahala Raï Banda's debut album, as well as with a handful of his own, seminal compositions (included in the Bucovina Club albums). This in turn most probably played a part in the birth of these live bands (sometimes dubbed 'Balkan Rock' or Gypsy Punk') which integrate Balkan, rock, hip hop & reggae elements.

Roots

Originally a respected electronic music producer (he released a.o. two albums on Studio K7 in the late 90s), Shantel became interested in East European music when he undertook a trip to the Bucovina region -now split between Ukraine and Moldavia- in search of family roots (his mother's family comes from there), which led to the creation of the Bucovina Club nights and albums. What he had previously heard on records as an exotic sound from a faraway place suddenly became physically tangible: wild brass ensembles, singers with soulful voices, melancholy bluesy ballads and instrumental melodies, the frenzied dances of Kolo, Hora and Cocek (a Balkan variation on belly dancing).

The cosmopolitan cultural and ethnic diversity of pre-war Bucovina also became an important source of inspiration for Shantel, whose imagination was fired by the history of his grandmother's hometown Czernovitz, the old capital of Bucovina, a city of great poets and thinkers such as Rose Ausländer, Paul Celan and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, of famous musicians such as the German-Jewish tenor Josef Schmidt ("the Caruso of the East"). Although the subsequent damage caused by Nazi occupation and Stalinism have irrevocably destroyed what was once a unique multicultural atmosphere, there is still an enormous interest there in nurturing those roots. By chance, a copy of the Bucovina Club CD managed to find its way to Bucovina. The locals were astonished to discover that a musician and DJ living so far away would draw upon these traditions. Eventually, in November 2004, there was a memorable homecoming. At the invitation of the Mayor of Czernovitz, during the heady Ukrainian autumn of the Orange Revolution, Shantel performed with the Jewish Orchestra of Czernovitz and musicians of the Mahala Rai Banda on the former Austria Square to a crowd of ten thousand young people, some of whom had brought along their orange banners.

There is another inspiration that links Shantel’s previous life as a producer of electronica with the Gypsies who, with their invaluable contribution to the music of the Balkans, probably invented the art of borrowing. On their journeys through many lands and cultures, they adopted a hook line here, a rhythm there, picking up fragments of melodies and choruses along the way, and putting them together to create something entirely their own. Towards the end of the twentieth century, 'electronic borrowing' (commonly known as 'sampling') became the basic production method of the various schools of electronica and dance music...

The Story So Far

Respectively released in 2003 and 2005, Shantel's Bucovina Club albums have earned him several awards (including a BBC World Music Award). They included tracks by leading Balkan bands, as well as exclusive remixes and original tracks by Shantel.

 Shantel has produced albums by several other artists, including Mahala Rai Banda and Boom Pam. His remix of Mahala Rai Banda's Mahalageasca was prominently used in the soundtrack of the Borat movie.

Shantel has written the original music for The Edge Of Heaven, the Fatih Akin movie which won an award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

 He has performed at major festivals and clubs across Europe, and has Bucovina Club residencies in Istanbul, Rome, Vienna, Zürich as well as several German cities.