Maria Almeida – Go East – Go Serbia!

We recently wrote about Go East party in Brazil, pointing out that’s it’s really creasy to realise that people are dancing to music from Serbia, in Brazil. And who is behind the Go East party? Not a Serb as you might expect but a 24 years old half brazilian, half portuguese producer, Maria Almeida who fell in Love with Belgrade, and Serbia. This got me thinking, so I asked her questions about Go East, Serbia and Balkan music. Maria Almeida answered them in a very kind way. Her story is fascinating:

I visited Serbia twice, first time in 2007-08 winter, when I first fell in love with the country. Got back for a second and longer staying still in 2008, during summer/autumn, and then back to Brazil. My first contact with Balkan music happened almost 10 years ago when, during my best friend’s birthday party a Romanian distant friend of ours came to us with a cassette tape, containing the complete soundtrack of the movie Underground. We immediately fell in love with the music, and in the years that followed, that tape was everything we knew about Serbia (at the time, “Yugoslavia”). For us it was weird to think that such wonderful music came from a region which the only references we had were the war-related ones we used to see on the TV. Anyways, one fine day we had a “click” and decided to search the internet for more music like that the tape. That was when we found out there was more to that music that we could imagine. I ended up meeting a couple more people here, in Rio, that shared the same passion for Balkan music that me and my closest friends had – and that was when we came out with the idea of making a party exclusively dedicated to music from the Balkans. It took us an entire year to make it happen, and during this process I became obsessed with the idea of travelling to Serbia and around, to get dipper into the culture, learn more and all. The first Go East edition came out in November 2007, and two weeks later me and my friends took a two month trip to the region – and I fell in love with it. The people, the culture, the music, the atmosphere, everything!There’s just something in the air in Serbia, that makes you feel welcomed, warm, I can’t quite explain. And it’s not only me: all my friends who went to Serbia after I did felt exactly the same, and they all look forward to coming back and staying longer. Even though at the time of my first visit to the country I couldn’t speak a word of Serbian, I felt more like home than I usually feel here, in Rio.

As for Serbs in the parties… The first time ever we got people from Serbia to visit the party was two months ago. A large group of young Serbs that were visiting Rio heard about the party somehow and decided to check it out. Since then, there are always some Serbs. Hungarians, Greeks and Macedonians, even Germans and French as well. But 90% of the people going to the party is native Brazilian.