A child from another war who makes music for Ukrainians

When the owner of an underground club in Kiev, long before the war, approached Western musicians to play in Ukraine, there were not that many applicants.

But an American from Boston, Mirza Ramic, accepted the invitation, sparking a lasting friendship with the club's owner, Taras Khimchak.

“I kept coming back,” Ramic, 40, said in an interview at the Mezzanine club, where he was preparing to perform during a recent tour of Ukraine.

The country, he said, “is one of the places that has welcomed me the most and supported my music the most.” And so he added, especially after the Russian invasion two years ago, “I wanted to come now to show my support in these difficult times.”

Mr. Ramic, born in Bosnia, is himself a child of war. At the age of 11, he lost his father in the shelling of his hometown of Mostar, and spent years as a refugee, moving from country to country with his mother as she struggled to find a way to survive.

They lived in Zagreb, Croatia; Tunis; and Prague, before moving to the United States, first to Arizona and finally to Boston. There he completed his education and began a career as a musician, forming an electronic band, Arms and Sleepers, with a college friend, Max Lewis.

Now a solo musician, he played again in Kiev and two other cities in the fall, undeterred by the threat of rocket attacks, giving free concerts in a personal commitment to stand with his Ukrainian fans.

“Art and culture during war are one of the most important things that keep people going because it gives them a sense of human dignity,” Mr Ramic said. “They are entitled to this even in difficult times.”

Mr Ramic also has many Russian fans – as well as Russian friends, including his promoter in Moscow, who left their home country in protest against the war in Ukraine. He said he tried to imagine the dilemma in his own context, how he, as a Bosnian, would have felt toward a Serb who was against the war. But since the invasion, he said, he had decided not to play in Russia again out of respect for the Ukrainians.

“It wouldn't be symbolically right to go there at this point,” he said.

The one constant in his life is music, and it has become his most important tool in navigating his traumatic life experiences. In the interview, he spoke eloquently about his life as a refugee and immigrant, about the loss of his father, and about his sense of alienation and not belonging anywhere.

“For me, music is a way to deal with these difficult core memories,” he said. “At its core, that's that.”

His mother, Selma, a piano teacher, taught him classical piano during their odyssey as refugees and hoped Mr. Ramic would become a concert pianist. But in his teens, he gave up the daily four hours of piano practice to focus on his studies, and instead took up playing piano and keyboards in bands throughout high school and college.

He studied Eastern European history and politics at Bowdoin College in Maine, and international relations in a master's program at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, driven by a desire to understand the geopolitics that form the backdrop to his life.

Yet he was gradually confronted with his own pain. In “To tell a ghost”, a short documentary he made a few years ago, he described the shock he felt when the class discussion turned to the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

“I remember sitting in class, drinking my coffee – just like everyone else – and suddenly freezing inside,” he said in the film. He could not participate in the discussion, he said.

In between courses he played in a rock band and in 2006 he founded together with Mr. Lewis Arms and Sleepers op. It was a special collaboration, he said, between Mr. Ramic, born a Muslim, and Mr. Lewis, who is Jewish and now teaches ethics at Yale University. The band's name reflects Mr. Ramic's views on the war in Bosnia, referring to the many who wielded weapons, and others, who did little to stop the war. “The world is sleeping,” he said.

He was nine when war broke out in Mostar, as Serb forces fought Croat and Bosniak fighters for control of the city. His memories are visceral.

“Skies filled with missiles,” he said in the interview. “We had a tank that rolled into our street, near our house.” He remembers looking at the tank from the kitchen window. “That was terror.”

As the fighting intensified, his father, Ibrica, a dentist, sent his wife and son out in a refugee convoy for women and children. He stayed in Mostar to look after their property and was killed the following year, in September 1993, when a mortar shell landed on the street in front of their house.

The loss of his father, with whom he was close, remains a defining trauma for Mr. Ramic. It has pulled him away from his home country, and he still struggles with deep sadness and sometimes depression, he said.

It recently led him to advise some Ukrainian friends not to join the army. “You will be more useful to your country alive,” he told them. “And for the next generation of people, like your child, if you stay alive, they will be in a much healthier and stronger position to make a difference.”

If his father had survived, he likely would have returned to Bosnia, Mr. Ramic said. His best friend from childhood survived the war in Bosnia and still lives in Mostar, where he works and raises a family, but Mr Ramic, a US citizen, said he doubted he would return there.

“It's too difficult emotionally,” he said. “I'm a bit in between. I don't really feel American, I don't feel Bosnian.”

He and his mother have returned to Mostar for visits, including in September for the 30th anniversary of his father's death. Much of the city is still in ruins, he said, and they have never restored their family home. The roof has been repaired with European help, but his father's dental equipment and other belongings lie untouched, covered in dust, as it was the day he died.

Mr Ramic moved to Berlin in 2020 and is spending time in other European countries – composing in Latvia during the pandemic, and in Spain organizing aid for Ukraine in February 2022, at the start of the invasion. Europe feels closer to its roots than America, he said.

“A lot of the music I make — and maybe that's why it resonates with people in places like Ukraine — is that it's kind of in between,” he said. “It's about belonging or not belonging and figuring out who you are, and maybe coming to the realization that it is you and that's it.”

His music is electronic, accompanied by cinematic videos that combine documentary film footage with kaleidoscopic, computer-generated electronic images, often with a strong political message. He is regularly confronted with the violence and tragedy around him – from his time working with at-risk youth on the South Side of Chicago, to the Black Lives Matter protests, to the war in Ukraine since it first began in 2014, when separatists seized power in parts. of the eastern region of the country.

Of 13 albums produced, he has a devoted following and has found a way to make a living from his music. He performed, dancing intensely on his keyboards, before a crowd of 200 people at the Mezzanine, a club in an old Soviet textile factory in Kiev. Some of the audience were followers of his on Facebook and knew his music, but others came by to see a rare American willing to play in wartime Ukraine.

His music is urgent and intense, but there are also quiet, ambient-influenced tracks. A fan of the Kiev concert, an IT engineer who gave only her first name, Yana, said she listened to his music while walking to forget the stress of the war.

“It takes you to a moment where you're not sad or happy, you're just balanced,” she said.

Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Kiev.