// Funk Guru
( / )Wann / Wo >> /
Funk Guru (Nenad Baric) was born in 1979 in a small city of Cakovec, located two hour drive north from Zagreb, Croatia's capitol city. He has spent his childhood there, and after finishing high school went to study graphic design at the Faculty of Graphic Arts in Zagreb.
His first contact with electronic music was listening to tapes of Jean Michel Jarre's albums in the late 80's, and soon he discovered DJ Ed's seminal radio show on Croatian national radio, which has opened up the world of electronic music to him. In the autumn of 1992, when he first heard Prodigy's debut album "Experience", he knew that music will be very important part of his life. In 1994 he went to his first big rave, the "Future Shock 2000" and soon after that, at the age of 15, he started buying records and bought his first turntable (which serves him well even today). At first, he was into industrial, hardcore/gabber sound, but soon he started buying and playing at local parties acid and trance records. Back then he bought his first jungle record – Burial by Leviticus.
After couple years of playing at local parties, he got fed up with the scene and quit DJ-ing until he came to study graphic design in Zagreb. There he started buying drum'n'bass records, fulfilling his old love toward breakbeat and all sorts of "broken" rhythms. In the year 2000 he started spinning at the mama net.club where he met Filip and Borna, who were also regularly playing drum'n'bass there. Due to the lack of drum'n'bass parties, they had soon realized that if they want to be able to play their records to a crowd in one of Zagreb's regular clubs, they will have to organize their own parties. So, in the autumn of 2001 they made their first party in Attack, the most alternative underground club in Zagreb. Party was a big success and they decided to form a crew with three more members, named the crew quite fittingly "confusion" and started their own regular drum'n'bass nights "Illectric Funk". In the next couple years "Illectric Funk" became Croatian premiere d'n'b night, hosting biggest names of the scene like Optical, Storm, Peshay, Calibre and many others. Soon they started smaller club nights called "Playground", organized two different festivals ("Illectric Funk Festival" and "S*CORE Snow & Music Festival") , organized "Videoskop" VJ events and shifted to other forms of electronic music beside drum'n'bass.
During the first period of working in "confusion" crew, he was spinning all sorts of d'n'b and jungle, from the atmospheric and liquid d'n'b to very hard techstep and neurofunk. After couple years his DJ sets became even more versatile, and now you can hear in his sets all sorts of electronic music – from 70BPM of dubstep and hip-hop, thru 140BPM of electro, IDM, breakbeat until 200+BPM's of breakcore, raggacore and gabber, but drum'n'bass and jungle remained as the backbone of his sets.
He has played alongside some of the best d'n'b DJ's like Roni Size, Storm, John B, Peshay, Optical etc, performed at festivals like Exit Festival in Serbia and Montenegro, MTV Valkana Beach in Croatia and many more, worked as a DJ support to various Croatian bands and lately he spends more and more time focusing on various interdisciplinary artistic projects like NoAge audio-video project.