Zoran Simjanovic (Simke) was born during the middle of the twentieth century, at just the
right time to become a rock musician and to get involved with applied music - perhaps the
only authentic musical genre of our times.
As we were growing up, artistic music was already on its way out, and new media were
coming on the scene, discovering new forms of expression at an incredible speed. In such
times, one needed to have two talents: one for grasping the developing technology; the other
for grasping the philosophy of rock 'n'roll. And only those who possessed both of these
seemingly completely different abilities were able to orient themselves to the fireworks going
off in the media sky. Simke was one of them.
That is the secret of his meteoric career, which is reflected not only by the number, but also
by the incomparable quality of his compositions across various genres. Film, theatre,
television and animation were but a single field through which Simke walked with absolute
sovereignty, revealing to us, his associates, the secrets of our own work. In a single moment,
everything would be shaken up to the point where we could not tell whether we were making
music while he worked on dramatic solutions, or vice versa. And that was the point where his
applied music got APPLIED.
Should anyone ask me to describe Simke and his work in a sentence, I would probably say
this: he is the greatest artist in the field of applied music, but he will never admit this.
That is not because he is falsely modest, but because his aim is not quasi-artism: it is creation.
It is no wonder, after all, that Simke "the rocker" has become a professor at the Faculty of
Dramatic Arts (FDU), and Faculti of Musical art (FMU) in Belgrade,an honorary citizen of
Valencia, one of three Yugoslav members of the European Academy of Film and Television and
a member of the Composers' Association of France. Now, if all this intrigues you, feel free
to read the strange biography that follows.
