Kultur Shock

Kultur Shock is a band from Seattle that mixes Balkan folk music with punk, metal and art rock. It was founded in 1996 by the singer Gino Srđan Jevđević, known abroad as Gino Yevdjevich, and he is the reason the band is on Muzika-Balkan under Bosnia: he is from Sarajevo, where he was already a well-known pop singer before the war. The band is still based in Seattle, where Jevđević settled in the mid-1990s, and it calls itself "a live band of blue-collar immigrants", with members from Bosnia, Bulgaria, Indonesia and the United States.

In Sarajevo Jevđević had grown tired of commercial pop and moved into theatre and then punk. When the war began in April 1992 he was at his mother's home across the river, cut off from his own flat on the front line, and he stayed there for three years while he and other artists kept performing in the besieged city; Joan Baez once joined them on stage. He finally left in secret, travelled through Croatia and reached the United States. He drew on his Roma background for the band, first playing the folk material acoustically before plugging in.

The first three studio albums were produced by Bill Gould of Faith No More for his label Koolarrow Records: FUCC the I.N.S. (2001), Kultura-Diktatura (2004) and We Came to Take Your Jobs Away (2006). The band then started its own label, Kultur Shock Records, and released Integration (2009), Ministry of Kultur (2011), IX (2014, recorded with the producer Jack Endino), D.R.E.A.M. (2019) and the two halves of a double album, House of Kultur (2025) and House of Shock (2026), as well as the live albums Live in Amerika, Live in Europe and Live at Home. The EP Tales of the Two Gurus, Vol. 2 (2016) was made with Edo Maajka, and in 2022 Jello Biafra's label Alternative Tentacles issued a 7-inch single with two songs from Integration.

Kultur Shock sings in Bosnian and in English, and its newer videos include "Snijeg" (2023), "Iluzije" (2024) and "Bosna in Time". The band has played well over a thousand concerts in the United States and Europe, from Seattle's Bumbershoot festival to the Motovun Film Festival in 2011. Today's line-up is Jevđević on vocals and trumpet, Val Kiossovski from Sofia on guitar, Matty Noble on violin, Chris Stromquist on drums, Guy Michael Davis from Jakarta on bass and Amy Denio on clarinet and saxophone.

Jevđević's story is told in Grandpa Guru (2024), a documentary by Silvio Mirošničenko that follows him between America, Sarajevo and his family. The playlist gathers the band's music videos and live clips from its own channel.