I, a non-believer, suddenly felt my beliefs become permeable and promiscuous, grief expanding the realm of what is possible to all of what I practised despite not believing in it. I felt a faith Johanna Hedva, a writer and witch devoted to ‘deviant forms of knowledge’¹, referred to as ‘shapeshifting and malleable’². Small rituals my muscle memory routinely performed now gained a new significance: changing sitting positions if something sinister is mentioned, not wishing someone a happy birthday before the day itself, avoiding opening two windows simultaneously so as not to cause a draft, or holding a button on your shirt if an ambulance passes.

These and many other mere ‘superstitions’ are embedded in the fabric of my land of origin – Serbia. They are colloquially said to be done ‘protiv uroka’, or so as to avoid casting an evil spell unbeknownst to you or inviting bad faith³. What many don’t realise is that this behaviour is part of a larger phenomenon: these ritual practices are predominantly derived from pagan times, ‘creating those whimsical combinations of paganism and Christianity labelled in Church Slavonic vocabulary as “double faith” (dvoeverie)’⁴. Double faith has made it possible for pagan traditions to sneakily persist through the Christianisation of the Slavs and weave themselves into the norms of Orthodox Christianity⁵. Together, they compose a dizzying soil for navigating grief, whether individual or collective.

The former Yugoslav region is in many ways drenched in grief: both unacknowledged post-war grief and grief for a future that never came. What was once a promise of economic and political stability, synonymous with joining the ‘Western world’, turned into a brain drain of youth in search of a better future and life-threatening corruption⁶.

This prolonged grief and its lingering haunting led (and still leads) to a perpetual growth: Christianity, tarot readings, foretelling the future and old cures for modern ailments all spread indiscriminately⁷. The permeable system of belief allows for an expansion of possibility. Here, an onion in your pocket and a prayer carry a similar weight, which is all the more important when one remembers that Orthodox Christianity is primarily a liturgical faith, meaning that it relies on ritual instead of the written word to spread its teachings⁸. So whether superstitious or religious rituals are concerned, they both send signals through our bodies and spread encoded meanings and whole histories whenever they’re performed. They communicate through us even when we claim not to believe in their transmission but perform them just in case. In some sense, the meaning of these superstitions and rituals sneaks past us and the dominant forces which were ‘supposed to’ prevent them from spreading.

I often ask myself how this history of clashing but co-existing beliefs impacts our meaning-making. Not just on an individual level, but on a cultural one.

Double faith here pops up like a noisy belief earworm, which lingers, takes up space in our memory and embeds itself into our mundane habits. By doing so, it spreads its area of association to many of the situations we go through individually and societally, thereby permeating the fabric we call culture.

Juxtaposition in noise

Belief, much like a tune, can sneak beneath the semantic register of a dogmatic religion and weave itself into our lives. You catch yourself singing the words to a song you weren’t aware of knowing. Double faith imprints meaning through the repetition of gestures, words, but also melodies. This is arguably its most enticing characteristic; something you never paid attention to wedges itself into your unintentional memory. This seems to be a largely involuntary process with music: sound travels through your body when it’s performed; even when you disengage, it has the potential to embed its noise within your subconscious. When I consider art that embodies this tenet of double faith, a genre-bending band springs to mind: ‘azza & kapale’⁹.

This musical project is part of the hauntological scene of the post-Yugo region, known for mashing together old folk songs, turbo-folk renditions, samples of presidential speeches and sound bites from familiar cartoons and video games. Slobodan Vujanović, a pop culture critic with a focus on music and film, characterised their work as being a ‘hyper-consumer, [one] who doesn’t have a responsibility to be devoted to or respect any genre’¹⁰. While they do layer sound without a dogmatic approach to continuing a musical legacy, this doesn’t make them faithless. Instead, through a performed ‘lack of belief’ in the clashing noise, they evoke a past most try to forget – that of a decade-long civil war accompanied by its own soundtrack – turbo-folk¹¹. This musical genre has been notoriously despised by anyone politically opposed to the Serbian aggression of the 90s. Jennifer C. Lena, a cultural sociologist concerned with genre classification, has written about turbo-folk (specifically in its original form) as ‘state-sponsored, government-purposed music’, but colloquially it is often perceived as blue-collar, unintellectual and simply uncultured¹². Some people even refuse to listen to it as if to avoid a ‘bad omen’ or a subconscious effect on one’s mind and morals. As a result, these same people neglect a past that they too were a part of, whether in subtle or overt ways. But azza & kapale acknowledge the complexity of this cultural history through juxtaposition, clash and overlap. Turbo-folk here isn’t merely given a platform, but it is changed and queered.

A similar phenomenon can be heard in xenaudial’s album ‘Adjacent Exposure’, in which two clashing songs are combined into one to form ‘double earworm inductions’¹³. What at first sounds like a crime against rhythm is now inseparable; once you hear one of the songs alone, you miss the presence of the other. They’re tied in your memory for better or for worse.

Although azza & kapale don’t credit the sounds they use and have more rhythmical compositions than xenaudial, they achieve a similar binding effect by adjusting a cultural memory. They sneak beneath the semantic register through a juxtaposition in noise. A bit tongue-in-cheek, azza & kapale combine eclectic songs such as Hanka Paldum’s ‘Prolazi moja mladost’, the folk song ‘Gusta mi Magla’ and Grand Master Flash’s ‘White Lines’ into a jarring soundscape. As Vujanović noted of a previous album, only a few years back this trespassing would have been like ‘crossing a barbed wire fence’ or constituted ‘sacrilege’¹⁴. The implication is that you cannot mix a genre born out of nationalism and ethnic hatred (turbo-folk) with indie because their politics simply don’t match. Yet, this musical approach acknowledges the fact they co-existed for many years. It encompasses the contradictions of a past many try to bury – that of violence against former Yugoslav neighbouring countries that was committed in ‘their name’ (their here being the Serbian people). It works with the haunting.

In Orthodox Christianity, the dominant religion in Serbia, ‘ritual relies on the body as a vessel to transmit and teach, to tell the message embedded within it’¹⁵. And the permeability of belief in this region creates an opening for rituals we just performed to be reified in our lives and the collective imaginary. Unbeknownst to us, regardless of what we actually claim to believe, we remember through performing a ritual¹⁶. Through repetition, things without a causal connection can gain one in our memory. Many neglect the power of transmission, overlooking the possibility that this is how we construct a version of the future. So, they might disengage from music that is in proximity to a time ‘best forgotten’, without understanding how this forgetting might change them and their collective trajectory. With a history of religious rituals that relied on the spoken, sung, performed and embodied to remember, a song becomes yet another ritual which encodes what you remember. Once sound is performed, it reverberates through your body, furthering a past into a future.

Formally, since 2016, recognised ritual practices such as fortune-telling, dream analysis and sorcery have been outlawed in Serbia¹⁷. What was formerly hiding in plain sight (double faith) is forced to disappear once more and find a new way of sneaking beneath the register of an established system of belief.

The permeable belief of this land leaves space for making meaning through magical means. For this, we don’t need rituals which perpetuate a sanitised version of the past, but instead ones whose clash and noise embed messages with most of the ghosts still intact (in the reverb or the drone). Melodies which won’t leave our bodies once they’re played, no matter – or precisely because of – how incongruent they sound. In this way, future generations decoding the sounds of a familiar tune whose origin was long forgotten will be able to uncover what dominant forces tried to sweep under the rug.

Footnotes

Reference List