Some musicians you can easily classify. Others are not so easy. It's not necessarily that they want to play hard-to-get. It's that their musical upbringing is a bit complicated. The World's Marco Werman has a case in point.

Darko Rundek doesn't play his grandfather's Balkan music. Not even his father's.

Darko Rundek is from Croatia.

The different republics of the former Yugoslavia all emerged from the war with different musical narratives.

There were the brass wedding bands that played through the mortars to keep up the spirits of their neighbors.

Gypsy musicians who lived through heightened racial tensions during -- and after -- the war.

Cheesy Serbian turbo-folk vedettes who serenaded Slobodan Milosevic and his cronies. Darko Rundek's story is different.

Early on in the war, Rundek fled his home of Zagreb in Croatia.

“And I went to Paris where my wife just gave birth to our boy. So it was quite irrational to bring them from Paris where they were in peace to Zagreb where war just started. It was more reasonable for me to go to Paris.”

Darko Rundek brought two musical influences to Paris. In Croatia in the 80s, he had fronted a pretty well-known post-punk band. It was called Hauster.

Rundek cites the Talking Heads and the Clash as chief influences. And before that, he had been composing for the theater in Zagreb, following in the cabaret tradition of Bertolt Brecht.

“And I enjoyed it because I did some new classics, or weird combinations of musical styles, and soundings and instruments, which I really enjoyed very much. And then after the war was over, the audience in all ex-Yugoslavian countries which were now divided, really remembered 80s when I was rock star there as better times and they were really calling for me to come back.”

and play for them.

Which Darko Rundek has done.

But he creates his music in Paris as he's done since he left Zagreb nearly fifteen years ago. When Darko Rundek first arrived in Paris, he connected with a Croatian musician friend who had already been living there. His friend was working in radio, and invited Rundek to make some extra money broadcasting with him.

One of the jobs landed them on a pirate radio station on a ship in the Adriatic sea.

They were making music and newscasts and broadcasting them to...the Balkans.

“It was a boat of 65 meters long, big heavy boat that came from exploration of North Pole, so it could crash the ice. And with one antenna of 30 meters built on it. We were in the middle of Adriatic so we couldn't see for weeks, we couldn't see the coast. Just blue, dark blue down, light blue up, and that's all. And birds, and sea turtles of one meter, a lot of dolphins, sharks, it was amusing to find all this life. But to broadcast from the international waters wasn't really legal.”

But at least it was peaceful out there on the water.
And it meant that Darko Rundek's fans in Croatia were not completely cut off from the music he was making during the war.

Darko Rundek continues his exploration of musical theater, post-punk sounds, and life post-wartime on his latest release, "Mhm A-ha Oh Yeah Da-Da."