Bloomsbury Academic Ardit Gjebrea’s Projekt Jon (33 1/3 Europe)

As market reforms were transforming citizenship in post-socialist Tirana, Albania, and Europe transitioned into its post-socialist state, Projekt Jon (1997) interrogated European identity formation. The resulting muzikë e lehtë (light music), with regional and wider-European influences, reflects an ideal undermined by political unrest and uncertainty. Projekt Jon―the Ionian Project―announces itself with the frenetic beating of the tupan and the traditional cries of Albania’s highland shepherd. The sprawling collaboration between singer-songwriter Ardit Gjebrea, traditional singer Hysni Zela, and a team of crack studio musicians in Italy, had an outsized ambition: to transcend Albania’s borders, imaginatively crafting in sound a new home in Europe for the post-socialist citizens of the embattled nation-state. But as Gjebrea prepared to take the album on tour, the homeland itself verged on the cusp of complete collapse. A civil war, the result of the cascading failure of pyramid schemes enabled by deep political corruption and massive social dislocations, loomed, and the tour became―at least for Gjebrea and other urban intellectuals―a referendum on the future of Albania.