so let me play for you
–from "Ruke" (hands)

How does Darko Rundek fill the absence which he writes of above? “These are hands, let me play for you” he answers in a deep, assured voice. Rundek is the charismatic leader of the Cargo Orkestar, a polyglot orchestra whose name alludes to the cargo cults of anthropological lore, and to its own role as well: "Cargo illustrates the idea of being a carrier of influences, trans-sphering different musical styles, transporting the contents of different cultures." Rundek writes.

In Rundek's hands, music becomes a vessel for the transport of signs, styles, cultural allusions – a heady stream of consciousness to fill an existential void, a fierce tone-poem to confront the silence in the wake of the Balkan apocalpyse.

Rundek spent six months on an EC radio ship during 1993, broadcasting a feature called Planet Ear to a war-torn Yugoslavia. According to Rundek, Planet Ear was a rather surreal narrative:

"Space tourists would come to the orbital station-hotel and then Captain Broundreck and Navigator Peternel would take a dozen of them on board to visit different regions of this imaginary planet. Those were really surrealistic, mind-streaming stories. I was the story-teller of some blown-up cult, reflecting the strong feeling of the end of the world, where only the impossible is possible, endlessly floating on the high sea only two hundred kilometres away from the orgy of violence in Bosnia and broadcasting towards there. Vedran Peternel created the sound-scapes, mixing music, documentary sounds, dialogues from movies, loops, with the speed and precision of a gambler. While we would work in the studio at 50°C, American porte-avion ships would pass by, and chaser airplanes where flying low waving hallo! to our ladies lying in the sun. In this kettle of blue soup with razor blades, creating instant poetry, the germ of Cargo Music was born."

The following interview was conducted over e-mail with Rundek:

The name and story behind the "Cargo Orkestar" leads me to believe that you are about cultural and musical mixtures, but even more, about the mistakes and myths which arise when different cultures interact. How does the Cargo Orkestar approach its many cultural influences?

These influences are part of our experience. I grew up on the edge between the Balkans and Central Europe, Isabel travelled a lot and played with oriental masters, as well as classic orchestras, Duco and Djani grew up in Sarajevo, on the crossroad of cultures, but also produced techno remixes, Vedran produced several albums of French alternative scene... So there is not construction or mystification that determines mixtures, but spontaneous associative floats.

In creating this amalgamated, global music, are you creating some sort of alternative geography or map - some different sense of the world from that professed in ideas like "Europe", or "Croatia", or the "East" and "West"?

Without a lot of thinking, we are searching for universal communication that would connect so called traditional civilizations of east and modern western civilization trying to maintain higher presence, or presence of the Higher.

What sort of experience would you like an audience at one of your concerts to have, or gain access to? How is playing with the Cargo Orkestar different from other musical projects you've done in the past?

We would like to create the occasion for something authentic to happen. So we bring in some songs and structures audience brings in its atmosphere, attention and energy. Then we actively allow creation to happen. In the past, I played with bands that would play either an arranged repertoire, either completely improvised music. This time it's the middle way.

You describe broadcasting from the "Radio Brod" ship in 1993 during the Yugoslav wars: "We were moving up and down in international waters of the Adriatic producing a programme without knowing who could really hear it, because there was no feedback, nobody could call-quite a surrealistic experience". How did this rather disconcerting, perhaps lonely, but also "free" experience affect your approach to storytelling, your ideas about the meaning of sounds and music?

I worked on the radio allot in eighties, as the director of radio-plays and features in the program that statistically didn't have many listeners, but was culturally important. I found that position very inspiring, but the forms were limited. At Radio Brod Vedrans and mine program "Planet Ear" opened an more spontaneous manner to play with sounds, music and story. Later reactions we had confirmed my feeling that it works. One aspect of CARGO is continuing that research.

The American jazz musician Sun Ra has a song in which his group chants: "It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet!?". Is your music also post-apocalyptic - stories and sounds for a world that has already ended, perhaps in Sarajevo, perhaps everywhere?

I would say that apocalypse is still going on now. We will know that it finished by the new growth coming, as every end is the beginning. But feeling the soul leaving the body of the world is hard. Let's try to preserve at least a particle of it as seeds. 

Jared Rosenbaum