When the proprietor of an underground membership in Kyiv reached out to Western musicians to play in Ukraine, lengthy earlier than the battle, there weren’t so many takers.
However an American from Boston, Mirza Ramic, accepted the invitation, spawning an enduring friendship with the membership’s proprietor, Taras Khimchak.
“I stored coming again,” Mr. Ramic, 40, mentioned in an interview on the membership, Mezzanine, the place he was getting ready for a efficiency throughout a latest tour of Ukraine.
The nation, he mentioned “is likely one of the locations that has welcomed me most and been probably the most supportive of my music.” And so particularly after the Russian invasion two years in the past, he added, “I needed to return now, to point out my assist in these exhausting occasions.”
Mr. Ramic, born in Bosnia, is a toddler of battle himself. At 11, he misplaced his father within the shelling of his hometown, Mostar, and spent years as a refugee, shifting from nation to nation along with his mom as she struggled to discover a strategy to survive.
They lived in Zagreb, Croatia; Tunis; and Prague, earlier than shifting to the USA, first to Arizona, and ultimately Boston. There, he completed his schooling and started a profession as a musician, forming an digital band, Arms and Sleepers, with a university good friend, Max Lewis.
Now a solo musician, he was again taking part in in Kyiv and two different cities within the fall, undeterred by the specter of missile strikes, giving free live shows in a private dedication to face alongside his Ukrainian followers.
“Arts and tradition throughout battle are probably the most essential issues that retains folks going as a result of it offers them a way of human dignity,” Mr. Ramic mentioned. “They’re additionally entitled to this in troublesome occasions.”
Mr. Ramic has many Russian followers too — in addition to Russian buddies, together with his promoter in Moscow, who left their house nation in protest on the battle in Ukraine. He mentioned he has tried to think about the dilemma in his personal context, how he as a Bosnian would have felt towards a Serb who was towards the battle. However because the invasion, he mentioned, he had determined to not play in Russia out of respect for Ukrainians.
“To go there, symbolically, at this second, wouldn’t be proper,” he mentioned.
The one fixed in his life has been music, and it has change into his essential instrument in navigating his traumatic life experiences. Within the interview, he spoke eloquently of his life as a refugee and an immigrant, of the lack of his father, and of his sense of alienation and never belonging anyplace.
“For me music is a strategy to take care of these troublesome core recollections,” he mentioned. “On the root, it’s that.”
His mom, Selma, a piano trainer, taught him classical piano all through their odyssey as refugees, and hoped Mr. Ramic would change into a live performance pianist. However in his teenagers, he gave up the each day 4 hours of piano observe to deal with his research, and turned to taking part in piano and keyboards in bands via highschool and faculty as an alternative.
He studied Jap European historical past and politics at Bowdoin School, in Maine, and worldwide relations in a masters’ program on the Fletcher College at Tufts College, pushed by a need to know the geopolitics that’s the backdrop to his life.
But he got here to confront his personal ache within the course of. In “To Inform a Ghost,” a brief documentary movie he made a number of years in the past, he described the shock he felt when the category dialogue turned to the wars of the previous Yugoslavia.
“I keep in mind sitting in school, consuming my espresso — like everybody else — and instantly freezing on the within,” he associated within the movie. He couldn’t take part within the dialogue, he mentioned.
In between programs, he performed in a rock band, and in 2006 he fashioned Arms and Sleepers with Mr. Lewis. It was a particular partnership, he mentioned, between Mr. Ramic, born a Muslim, and Mr. Lewis who’s Jewish, and now educating ethics at Yale College. The band’s title displays Mr. Ramic’s view of the battle in Bosnia, referring to the various who wielded weapons, and others, who did little to cease it. “The world was sleeping,” he mentioned.
He was 9 when battle broke out in Mostar as Serbian forces fought Croatian and Bosnian fighters for management of town. His recollections are visceral.
“Skies full of rockets,” he mentioned within the interview. “We had a tank that rolled into our avenue, by our home.” He remembers watching the tank from the kitchen window. “That was terror.”
Because the combating intensified, his father, Ibrica, a dentist, despatched his spouse and son out in a refugee convoy for ladies and youngsters. He stayed in Mostar to take care of their property and was killed the following yr, in September 1993, when a mortar shell landed on the street outdoors their home.
Dropping his father, with whom he was very shut, stays a defining trauma for Mr. Ramic. It wrenched him away from his homeland, and he’s nonetheless wrestling with a deep disappointment and typically melancholy, he mentioned.
It led him lately to advise a few Ukrainian buddies towards enlisting within the military. “You’ll be extra helpful to your nation alive,” he informed them. “And for the following technology of individuals, like your little one, they’re going to be in a a lot more healthy and stronger state to make a distinction, in case you keep alive.”
If his father had survived, he would most likely have gone again to Bosnia, Mr. Ramic mentioned. His finest good friend from childhood survived the battle in Bosnia and nonetheless lives in Mostar, working and elevating a household, however Mr. Ramic, an American citizen, mentioned he doubted he would return to stay there.
“It’s too troublesome emotionally,” he mentioned. “I’m kind of in between. I don’t actually really feel American, I don’t really feel Bosnian.”
He and his mom have returned to Mostar for visits, together with in September for the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s dying. A lot of town nonetheless stands in ruins, he mentioned, they usually have by no means restored their household house. The roof was fastened with European help, however his father’s dentistry tools and different possessions lie untouched, coated in mud, because it was the day he died.
Mr. Ramic moved to Berlin in 2020, and spends time in different European international locations — composing in Latvia in the course of the pandemic, and in Spain organizing assist for Ukraine in February 2022 at first of the invasion. Europe feels nearer to his roots than America, he mentioned.
“Quite a lot of the music that I create — and maybe that’s why it does resonate with folks in locations like Ukraine — is that it’s form of in-between,” he mentioned. “It’s about belonging, or not belonging and determining who you might be, and perhaps coming to the belief that it’s simply you and that’s it.”
His music is digital, accompanied by cinematic movies that blend documentary movie footage with kaleidoscopic, computer-generated digital visuals, typically with a robust political message. He regularly confronts the violence and tragedy round him — from his time working with at-risk youth on the South Facet of Chicago, to the Black Lives Matter protests, to the battle in Ukraine since its first beginnings in 2014 when separatists seized energy in components of the jap area of the nation.
With 13 albums produced, he has a devoted following and has discovered a strategy to stay off his music. He carried out, dancing intensely over his keyboards, earlier than a crowd of 200 folks on the Mezzanine, a membership set in an outdated Soviet textile manufacturing unit in Kyiv. A few of the viewers have been followers of his on Fb and knew his music, however others got here alongside to see a uncommon American keen to play in wartime Ukraine.
His music is pressing and intense, however there are additionally calm, ambient-influenced tracks. One fan on the Kyiv live performance, an I.T. engineer who solely gave her first title, Yana, mentioned she listened to his music when out strolling to overlook the stress of the battle.
“It takes you to some second the place you might be neither unhappy nor completely happy however simply in stability,” she mentioned.
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Kyiv.
