Celestial Connections

In January 1992, I left my hometown of Sarajevo for a trip to the United States. I was supposed to return on May 2 of that same year, but that was the day the siege fully closed around the city. I did not fly out of Chicago and started my next life there. I watched the war and the siege on TV or received the news by word of mouth, or in random calls from a satellite phone some of my friends had access to, or via letters bearing stamps from France, Italy, or the United States that had been smuggled out by the foreigners who could travel. Every instance of communication with a friend under the siege could’ve been the last. A few occasions, I sent packages with some journalists or people going back in through the Tunnel, the sole lifeline for the besieged city, though there was always the possibility that the package would not arrive in time. The war lasted through early 1996. I returned to Sarajevo in the spring of 1997, but I would never live there again. My life was now fully split into the irretrievable before and the diasporic after.

In the before, I had a band called Strajder, which I started with Goran Marković. We had been friends since first grade. Music had always been our strongest bond. The band dissolved after I discovered the many benefits of having a girlfriend, not least the regular sex. During the subsequent three decades in America, I did not play or make any music, save for the occasional Beatles’ song strummed on an acoustic guitar for my daughters. Goran ended up in California, where he kept up his guitar playing and performed with some jam bands and friends from work. We were in touch off and on; we talked on the phone, and I would see him on my West Coast book tours, but we never talked much about music, let alone made any together. Simple state-of-life conversations were the order of the day. It seemed that in the after—after we’d stopped playing music—our friendship lapsed into a kind of dormancy. I was a full-time author and professor now, listening to music nonstop but no longer making it.

But then came 2020. I was teaching at Princeton University, which had emptied out with the arrival of the coronavirus. My career as an author was indefinitely suspended—no travel, no readings, no conferences, all readers preoccupied with the new disaster, which was fully compounded by the advance of violent trumpism. An ocean of anxious time stretched itself before me. And so I acquired an electric guitar, an amp, and three pedals. At first, I would just sit in the bedroom with headphones on and improvise over looped riffs, which provide little comfort or relief. Then I developed an urge to start recording tracks. I did not understand it then, but now it is clear to me that the hunger for producing music was my way of dealing with my separation from other people. Aware that the unfolding catastrophe was splitting time into a new before and after, I needed to make something for that after, assuming that we—or at least someone—would survive to see it.

While the common (bourgeois) concept of literature is that of the writer’s isolated mind communicating with the reader’s solitary mind, music is inescapably communal, perpetually generating its own networks of experience, collaboration, influence, and signification. It is biologically determined as well, since the human body naturally produces sounds and beats—there is no culture in the world without music. Moreover, like all art, it implies and necessitates the presence of other people in the world. Music is always made for others, and/or with others; even if you’re playing alone in your bedroom, music creates space for the presence of other people, presupposing a future in which they might be able to engage with it in a communion of shared experience. I believe that the roots of music lie in the human practices of prayer and dance, both of which can carry people down the path of transcendence. All art is inherently utopian, as it is always addressed to a time when the present limits—be they loneliness, displacement, suffering, mortality—are surpassed. Though no one who knows me would describe me as hopeful or optimistic, whenever I produced music, I’d have a vision of people dancing—bodies in the same space, inhabiting the joy—in some post-pandemic, post-trump time.

And so I set out to learn how to produce music on my computer. Some of it I gleaned from YouTube videos, but I learned the most from a former Bosnian refugee who now works as a psychiatrist in Washington, DC, and was producing music in his basement “for his own soul” (as the Bosnian idiom goes), which evidently needed to connect to other souls, mine included. Out of the blue, I contacted Goran and asked if he wanted to join my hopeful and hopeless (financially, professionally) music project. He and I had always had rather different musical taste, but there was enough overlapping for us to share a referential field and exciting arguments. While he was never particularly fond of dance music, he still said yes to my invitation instantly, and our dormant friendship snapped into full wakefulness. I sent him the demo I had ready, and at his home in Seaside, California, he recorded the guitar parts for a track called Howdy, Hand of God! The title refers to a story about Beethoven conducting his Ninth Symphony. After a triumphant performance, the crowd gave a standing ovation, but Beethoven, by then completely deaf, could not hear any of it, so a singer (a soprano, I imagine) touched him to turn him around and face his exhilarated audience. I believe that touch was holy—the first and the most intense contact between the ecstatic space of music and the audience, the others. Howdy, Hand of God! was the first single Cielo Hemon—as
I decided to call my music act—released. On the cover, there was a picture of a nuclear explosion: precisely the kind of divine touch that splits the world into a before and after.

From there, Cielo’s musical network grew, spreading to co-opt a sound engineer in Sarajevo; cover-design artists in California, Illinois, and Switzerland; and visual artists who produced music videos in Bosnia, Germany, New Mexico, Missouri, and Japan. In the before, music could be made only with the people who were in the same room as you—that’s how Strajder, my before band, had worked. What has changed in the after is not only that a technology has emerged that allows one to be in real-time creative communication with others across continents, but also, and more importantly, that the displaced people—the ever-expanding diasporas—could now synchronously experience the joy of music or art that related to their (dis)position in the fractured world. Today, after four years of producing music, Cielo has forged not only quite a few beats, grooves and sounds, but also a vast network of friends and collaborators, some of whom I have still met only on Zoom. There are even some listeners spread around the globe: Sarajevo, Chicago, Hanoi, Karachi, Lima, New York, Milano, Budapest, Cologne, etc. The true triumph, however, is in the communal process of making something out of nothing, in constructing and maintaining a network bound by the music. Together, we strive to emerge from the before by way of the music made for those who will live in the after, perhaps even for us, in a different, hopefully better world.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of novels including The Lazarus Project (Riverhead, 2008) and The World and All That It Holds (MCD, 2023); a selection of essays, The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); the script for The Matrix Resurrections (2021); as well as three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno (Picador, 2000); Nowhere Man (Nan A. Talese, 2002); and Love and Obstacles (Riverhead Books, 2009.) He is also a DJ and music producer, working under the name Cielo Hemon. Born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, he left in 1992 for a short visit to the United States, and has now lived there for most of his long life. He teaches at Princeton University.