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Miguel Costa, the head of Ibiza’s tour-
ist board, told me that, though he hoped
many visitors would discover the island’s
beaches and restaurants, “Ibiza is very
known because of electronic music—it’s
something unique.”

M


laden Solomun knew nothing
of Ibiza until he was in his thir-
ties. Born in Yugoslavia, he grew up
in the Altona district of Hamburg,
Germany. He described himself to me
as a “street kid” who was crazy about
soccer. At an early age, he learned to
fight. His father worked in construc-
tion; his mother was a seamstress. Both
were Bosnian Croats, and most of their
neighbors were immigrants, too. In
the family’s first Hamburg apartment,
there was no shower—Solomun’s fa-
ther had to build one—and their only
German neighbor was a heroin addict.
Another neighbor, an alcoholic, beat
his wife; Solomun remembers listen-
ing for noise, in case his family needed
to intercede. Fotios Karamanidis, Sol-
omun’s business partner, and his clos-
est friend since childhood, recalls Al-
tona as “a jungle.”
In the mid-eighties, when Solomun
was around ten, the family moved to

another rough area. Soon afterward,
Solomun’s older cousin, who was twenty-
two, dropped by with a gift: a cassette
tape recorded at a local club where the
cousin was friendly with the d.j. “I didn’t
know anything about the music,” Sol-
omun said. “I mean, it was disco shit. I
didn’t understand it. But what I did un-
derstand was: this music is not on the
radio. It made me curious.”
A local youth center held a disco
night every Wednesday. When Solo-
mun was fourteen, an adult at the cen-
ter noticed that he was interested in
learning how the turntables worked,
and entrusted him with a small bud-
get to buy records: R. & B., funk, hip-
hop, soul. At these events, the boys
were focussed mainly on chasing girls,
and vice versa, but occasionally some-
one moved to the rhythm. Solomun
saw each dancer as a victory: “I was,
like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,
but something is happening.’ ” 
Solomun eventually stopped play-
ing disco night, but he continued col-
lecting records. He had no thoughts of
a career in music. He was good enough
at soccer that the coach of Germany’s
national youth team expressed inter-
est, but Solomun said that he would

play only for Yugoslavia. His family re-
turned home every summer. In 1992,
when Solomun was seventeen, war
broke out in Bosnia, and his family’s
tiny Hamburg apartment filled with
relatives who were fleeing the conflict.
Solomun wanted to go fight; his father
told him not to be stupid. 
Solomun describes the period that
followed as lost years. (He won’t elab-
orate, except to say that he abandoned
sports, music, and school.) When he
was in his early twenties, his father
dragged him “off the streets” to work
on a construction crew. Solomun re-
members sitting in a portable toilet on
a building site, wondering if the rest
of his life would involve mindless labor.
He told himself, “I have to at least try
to do something else.”
Fatih Akin, a film director who is
two years older than Solomun, and
who also grew up in Altona, had just
released “Short Sharp Shock,” a gang-
land noir that drew comparisons to
Martin Scorsese. Solomun was in-
spired—the movie proved that some-
one from his background could “fol-
low their creativity.” He took entry-level
jobs in the film industry, and within
four years he’d learned enough to pro-
duce his own short—a chaotic crime
caper. Meanwhile, he was falling deeper
in love with electronic music. A friend
had taken him to a warehouse party in
Hamburg where the d.j. played techno,
and the sound instantly hooked him. 
At twenty-six, Solomun d.j.’d at an-
other friend’s birthday party, in a fifth-
floor apartment in Hamburg’s red-light
district. He played funk, pop, hip-hop,
house, techno. The music spilled out
the open windows, initiating an im-
promptu street party. Everyone from
tourists to sex workers started danc-
ing. The experience was too much fun
not to repeat. Solomun organized a
ticketed party in an art gallery. A hun-
dred and fifty people bought tickets;
five hundred showed up. He eventu-
ally resolved to commit to music. With
his paltry savings, he bought a cheap
computer and asked a local hip-hop
producer to help him learn digital-
composition software. “I started from
zero, no money,” he told me. “Some-
times I had five euros and had to de-
cide—do I buy a pack of cigarettes or
a kebab?”

“Maybe you should start thinking bigger.”

• •

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