PMG Kolektiv

PMG Kolektiv, short for Progresivna multimedijalna grupa (Progressive Multimedia Group), is an art collective from Skopje that has been active in Macedonian popular culture since August 1995, and the band at its centre. Musicians, DJs, theatre directors, actors, designers, painters and hackers have passed through it. The band's music is described as disco-punk, post-industrial pop, post-punk, new wave, dance rock and electro-pop.

It began as a home-studio project in 1997 with a reworking of "Ajde da letame" by Balkan Ekspres, sung by Karolina Gočeva. The first original song, "Bernard Panasonik", followed a year later. Both were made on a computer at home and were released only many years later, on the compilation for the collective's 20th anniversary.

As a real band PMG started in 2003 with "Skopjanka", whose video was one of the most played Macedonian videos of the time. Singer Mirko Popov, Goran Atanasovski-Robotek on synthesisers and Ljupa Angelov on guitar made it one of the leading bands of the new Macedonian scene. The first concert came on 14 December 2005 at the Taksirat festival, and on 4 April 2007 they played abroad for the first time, in Belgrade. The debut album Rezonator came out in 2007 on the collective's own label, PMG Recordings.

In February 2008 they released the CD Nie sme od Skopje, with three new songs and six remixes of the title track, and set off on their first Balkan tour: twelve concerts in Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Croatia in two weeks. The concept album Prijatelski ogan, with three songs in English, was launched on 9 January 2009 and followed by six concerts from Sarajevo to Zrenjanin. Da 4 appeared on 2 April 2010, and that September they released their version of Ekaterina Velika's "Ljudi iz gradova" as "Lugje od gradovi".

A vekot taka dobro započna was recorded live in February 2011 in Goce Stevkovski's studio Chicken Madness, with all lyrics by Mirko Popov; it was the band's first album sung entirely in Macedonian. They launched it on 24 December 2011 at the MKC in Skopje during the 20th birthday of radio Kanal 103, together with their version of Aleksandar Džambazov's evergreen "Štom te vidam", made with Darko Jordanov. Klan Secular followed in November 2012.

In 2015 came a cover of Idoli's "Retko te viđam sa devojkama" and the single "Ti si mojot svet", and on 4 December 2015 a big party at Taksirat marked 20 years of the collective and ten of the band. The album Skopje followed on CD in 2016 and on vinyl in 2017. In May 2017 PMG Recordings released a seven-song album with "Sex Rap!", which Popov wrote and sang with Kristina Gorovska of Bernays Propaganda.