Conclusion
As contemporary artists Michael Hieslmair and Michael Zinganel (2019) show, Vienna has long been an important node in the global flows of people, services, goods, and capital. The city’s rhythms have been changed by events in diverse locations, particularly in former Yugoslavia. A more extensive rhythmanalysis of post-Yugoslav presence in Vienna manifested through the repetition of patterns of certain measure and frequency is still needed. In the meantime, however, my goal has been to highlight key findings of an analysis of the two sound objects in this study. Among their shared features is their openness to diverse participants. This clear commitment to accepting outsiders, whether ethnic or socioeconomic, may be essential for diasporic communities that need to overcome the legacy of inter-ethnic conflict and operate in a fairly multicultural “global space.” At the same time, Planet continues to engage in some of the Balkans’ self-stereotyping that tends to be more associated with the lower social strata and from which established elites maintain a careful distance.
The nostalgia conveyed in both these objects also signals the age group of their producers. Like any other kind of nostalgia, Yugonostalgia carefully curates the artefacts that it will preserve while consigning others to oblivion. Planet and Momentum both reveal and raise questions about the tropes and preoccupations of different Balkan Viennese communities including their nostalgic appropriations of the music of certain bygone eras. For Momentum, this refers especially to the decades between the 1960s and the 1980s that were, in its producers’ view, the heyday of popular music in socialist Yugoslavia. For Planet, the “retro” spirit probably relates to the years from the 1980s to the 1990s leading up to the crises and fall of Yugoslavia. It does not incorporate the breakup of former Yugoslavia or its inter-ethnic wars since the station is explicit about its openness to “all nations and all generations.”
On the other hand, the analysis of Momentum and Planet shows that whatever their claims to openness and tolerance, these objects are not at all sonically omnivorous but instead reflect fairly exclusive interests. At the same time, the class positions of their producers and audiences are blurred by the flexibility of late capitalist production in which self-employed service providers form the de facto working class. That these projects have accrued some transcultural capital is particularly evident in the case of Momentum, which does not identify with any ethnicity. Ultimately, Momentum’s explicit cosmopolitanism and devotion to rare sounds read as a class-privileged expression of the right to a protected space. The latter should be well-insulated from the rough, macho, ethnic, and self-exoticizing noises of the lower classes.