By the blood of the musician Stefan Hantel rivers of all colors. Though born in Frankfurt (Germany) in 1968, his father is half Greek half Germanic and his mother’s family comes from the Bukovina, a region between Ukraine and Romania. “I am abroad both in Eastern Europe as in Western Europe,” he says. This richness is reflected in his music, an intoxicating kaleidoscope Balkan tradition blends with electronics.

Shantel (that’s his stage name) is a national hero in countries such as Turkey and Greece, thanks to sound bombs as ‘Disko Partizani’, with almost five million patients visiting YouTube. Yesterday he played in Zaragoza on Saturday acts in Madrid (Joy Eslava) next to the Bucovina Club Orkestar, a shaking platform for musicians who have gone from Canada, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, France, Romania and Israel. “Many people want to categorize my work and relate in the Balkan pop phenomenon. However, my music transcends boundaries and becomes a map of the complexity of Europe.”

Committed a belligerent spirit and anarchist, Shantel not mince his words when talking to some colleagues. “Emir Kusturica is a great filmmaker. I recognize the value of his work as a musician, similar to that of Goran Bregovic. However, in recent years it has become a very nationalistic. I do not want that I identify with all that shit” . Neither Madonna out that well. “I was asked to make a version of a song from their latest album. He gave me a lot of money. I thanked him but told him to keep the money for it. What is supposed to be catch and run? There are things which to me makes no sense. Madonna does not make sense. ”

Apart from Madonna, also bought Shantel services (in these cases most successful) artists like Sacha Baron Cohen in ‘Borat’, and the German-Turkish director Akin in ‘Soul Kitchen’. And their work is comparable to that of the Franco-Algerian Khaled and Rachid Taha, architects of the merger of rai with electronics, or the Portuguese Buraka Som Sistema and its mix of Congolese music with hip hop and techno. In the compilation ‘Bucovina Club’ (2002 and 2005), Shantel provided an electronic sounds and dance to traditional songs of the Balkans, turning a melody Serbian turbo-folk success for youth.

Shake head, body and heart

As a voracious shredder, Shantel has engulfed all kinds of sounds throughout his long career. In 1994 he debuted with ‘Club Guerrilla’, “an experimental album that captures the spirit of the illegal parties that were held electronics in Berlin and Frankfurt on 80 and 90, although his final departure, and his confirmation as one of the values freshest underground music ‘European, came with “Disko Partizani” (2007) and’ Planet Paprika ‘(2009), two restless and iconoclastic work, which are danced in the clubs of Eastern Europe and Central Europe.

“The goal of my music is to move the body, head and the heart,” Shantel said, adding that his music goes to ‘the generation that has grown up listening to hip hop and techno. ” Although he believes that the economic crisis has brought the worst side of human beings in Europe (“there is a rise of right-wing movements that want to control immigration”), Shantel is optimistic. And not for a second. At the end of this year will have given over 200 concerts all over the continent and in 2011 celebrated the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Bucovina Club Orkestar album with “very special.”

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