On September 4th, 1999, the Love Parade came to Prishtina for the first time. The Kosovan capital's adaptation of Berlin's legendary techno street party was organised by DJ Njeri, who's been exposing the city to acid house, techno, rave, gabber, drum & bass and house since 1989. The first few minutes of camcorder footage from the day could be from any city: crowds laugh, dance and drink beer on flatbed trucks and pickups in the sunshine as DJs in bucket hats and baggy T-shirts pump out searing techno.

Eventually, the convoy of floats moves from its meeting point and begins to inch up one of the city's main thoroughfares. An MC on the lead float starts to whip up the assembled "party people" with exhortations that would be familiar the world over. Then comes a flurry of reminders of this party's extraordinary context. "Thank you KFOR, thank you!" the MC yells in English, referring to the Nato-led peacekeeping Kosovo Force. A roar goes up as the mic passes to a man wearing a large orange and black felt hat. "Shout is going out to KFOR, UN and all others who helped, thank you all, thank you!" Cheers and whoops fill the air, and with exquisite timing, an American flag heaves into view, hoisted by the crowd dancing on the float behind. The camera pans over a long line of white SUVs with "UN" printed on the passenger doors in long, thin black letters. Passersby wave and cheer at the convoy, and cars and buses headed in the other direction honk their horns in celebration.

Prishtina's first Love Parade took place just 86 days after the end of a horrifying 16-month war that threatened to wipe out or permanently displace the ethnic Albanians who comprise around 90 percent of Kosovo's population. The seminal misfortune of Kosovo in the 1990s was to be the place seen by Serbian nationalists as their "Jerusalem" at a time when an ever more extreme and thuggish brand of nationalism was on the rise in Belgrade. Mythology around the Battle Of Kosovo in 1389, in which Ottoman invaders defeated Serbian forces, has for centuries imbued Kosovo with "sacred land" status in Serbian nationalist ideology. Ethnic Serbs had left Kosovo, which from 1992 on was a southwestern province of a Yugoslavian rump state consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, in droves during the 1980s. The new leader in Belgrade, Slobodan Milošević, made reversing this trend a top priority, revoking Kosovo's political autonomy under communism in 1989 and introducing an apartheid-style system of open discrimination against the Kosovo-Albanian majority.

Armed resistance to Belgrade bubbled sporadically for years, but in 1995 the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) launched an insurgency against Milošević's security forces, and in February 1998, full-scale war broke out. Atrocities multiplied (a small but significant percentage of them committed by the KLA) and a refugee crisis rapidly developed. Between 1.2 million and 1.45 million Kosovo-Albanians—the vast majority of the Kosovo-Albanian population—were displaced to refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania. In spring 1999, Nato began bombing targets in Serbia and Serbian forces inside Kosovo, and 78 days after the intervention, Milošević withdrew under the Kumanovo Agreement, which put Kosovo under temporary UN administration. The days from June 10th to 12th 1999 marked Kosovo's de facto separation from Serbia, and just four years after the Bosnian War, another genocide in the Balkans was averted.

The Love Parade in Prishtina 12 weeks later isn't the most important thing that's happened in electronic music in postwar Kosovo. But watching the video from that day, it felt as though a lot could be divined about the country's connection with electronic music from thousands of its citizens choosing to celebrate survival itself with a techno party. Anxious not to exaggerate the event's significance, I asked Oda Haliti, a prominent Prishtina DJ and human rights activist, for her take.

"It was exactly as it looks and feels on the video," she said, delighted that I had happened upon this little piece of her country's history. "No exaggeration, we had been saved from being wiped out. We were so humble, thankful and super happy, and the way a lot of people in Prishtina wanted to celebrate was with a big party, united, with electronic music. It still makes me emotional to watch it."

Just over two decades after the 1999 Love Parade, in November 2019, I sat in a taxi inching up the same traffic-clogged stretch of road I had seen in the video. I was on my way into town from Adem Jashari airport, one of many pieces of infrastructure in Kosovo named after fallen heroes of the KLA. The 1999 Love Parade's starting point is now home to "Newborn," a monument spelling that word out in English in huge, colourful letters, unveiled on February 17th, 2008, the day Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. A bust of Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary Of State during the war, is a few steps up the road, which is now named Luan Haradinaj Street, after another KLA martyr. Bill Clinton Boulevard is a couple of minutes south, the centrepiece of which is a giant statue of the 42nd US President, waving and wearing a benign, fatherly smile. Another street is named after the UK's prime minister at the time—a number of Kosovan boys born in the wake of the war were famously given the first name "Tonibler."

Downtown Prishtina made it through the war relatively unscathed, and street names and statues are the most obvious reminders there now. The city lies roughly in the centre of Kosovo, a landlocked, diamond-shaped patch of territory only slightly larger than the London metropolitan area. Prishtina is a relatively modest-looking place with an occasional remarkable building, most notably the otherworldly 3D collage of cubes and domes that is the National Library Of Kosovo, and the Mohawk-like Palace Of Youth And Sports. Traffic is bad, and, as in many recently deregulated Eastern European cities, cranes clutter the skyline, throwing up endless new apartment and office blocks, many of them illegal.

I arrived on a Friday with a quiet first evening in mind. I was tired from an early flight, and the event I had planned my visit around, the November edition of a techno party called Rilindja Warehouse, was not until Saturday. Kosovan hospitality is the stuff of legend, however, and word travels fast in Prishtina, so a couple of hours after arriving, I found myself jumping in a car with someone I'd just met to meet an unknown group of people for dinner and then go with them to a night I hadn't known was happening.

In the car was Genti Rizaj, an irrepressible man-about-town who lived in Brooklyn for several years before returning to Prishtina to help run and DJ at Spray Club. Spray was the spot in Prishtina in the mid-to-late 2000s, and we'd barely made it 20 yards down the road before Rizaj was slapping his steering wheel and declaring it, with what I would soon learn was his trademark reserve, to have been "the best fucking club in the world."

Rizaj became the foremost of several unofficial guides during my week in Prishtina, picking me up in his white Citroen DS4 most days and taking me to see something, eat something or meet someone new, determined that I should experience all the best things about his city and country. On one drive through the winding streets of the city's hilly north, he pointed out a nondescript old apartment building and told me it was where he had attended one of many illegal Albanian-language schools as a kid.

"Whenever they caught us there, the Serbs would beat the shit out of us," he breezily added, a programme on his beloved BBC World Service murmuring out of the car stereo as I spluttered and stared down at my shoes.

That first night Rizaj took me to a much-loved grill restaurant—a "hidden gem" in highly literal ways due to having no official name and being hidden behind a ten foot-high brick wall. There we met a longtime local promoter named Ardin Badivuku, and Nemax, a young Belgrade DJ he had booked to play at that night's Next Level, a house and techno party he runs along with a festival called Unum on the coast of Albania. Badivuku was glued to his phone over dinner. His headliner, a Russian deep house DJ, was having trouble getting into the country because of a passport problem. An anxious wait ensued while he travelled overland from the Albanian capital Tirana to bypass the tighter security at the airport.

In the end, the headliner was turned away, and I naively asked if this was a common hazard when putting on parties in Kosovo. In fact, it's far more common for Kosovan artists to have problems getting to other countries. Kosovo is still not recognised as an independent state by around half of the world's nations. Its citizens must tackle arduous and expensive visa processes to visit much of Europe and the rest of the world. Every artist I talked to with a high enough profile to be booked outside Kosovo had stories of missing coveted gigs in London, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere because they couldn't get the paperwork through.

At Teatri ODA, a mid-sized space within the gigantic Palace Of Youth And Sports that only occasionally functions as a club, Nemax and two other DJs originally booked for support slots stepped up to become Next Level's co-headliners, playing rolling tech house and melodic techno to a crowd seemingly unfazed by the big-name absentee. Along with a few others, I shuttled between the club and a private party at a nearby villa, where I met another clutch of friendly, passionate Kosovans eager to talk about the city and its scene.

"It's great that you've managed to pick a weekend when there are two good things on," one of them said to me as Rizaj took to the decks in the corner of the living room. "Usually, we have to wait a few weeks between good nights, but this weekend is special."

At this point, nobody knew a global pandemic was brewing that would massively curtail the activities of everyone involved in clubbing around the world, including Next Level and the rest of the Prishtina scene. A torrid 2020 for Badivuku ended with some good news as the Albanian government gave the green light for his festival to return. With new cases down to almost zero in Albania, Unum went ahead over the first weekend in June, with guests including Sven Väth, Ricardo Villalobos and Ben Klock and afterparties extending well into this week.

After a long winter of uncertainty Kosovo finally struck a vaccines deal with Pfizer in May and will begin its mass-vaccination programme on 15 June, with the aim of vaccinating 60 percent of the population by the end of the year.

The following evening, still having barely seen Prishtina in daylight, I made my way down Luan Haradinaj Street to a restaurant to meet Arbnor Dragaj and Uran Badivuku, the founders of the collective and NGO Hapësira. Dragaj and Badivuku are in their early 30s, have been friends since school and share a relationship that verges on the telepathic.

"Sometimes we fall out a bit and don't talk for a week or two," said Dragaj, who's relatively short and stocky next to the beanpole-like Badivuku. "When we start talking again, we always find that we've been independently working on different things that needed to be done without having discussed or planned it, in exactly the way we would have if we had been talking."

Since it began in 2014, Hapësira's party, Rilindja Warehouse, has evolved from a one-off event into a much-loved monthly fixture. It has become one of the most important cultural initiatives of any kind in Kosovo and spawned a yearly mini-festival, Visions Of Beyond, which has a more varied musical remit than Rilindja Warehouse, which focuses on pounding, Berghain-style techno. Ostgut Ton's Answer Code Request was one of three German artists booked for the edition of Rilindja Warehouse I attended, which was organised in collaboration with the German embassy to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among the 15 or so dinner guests was Christian Heldt, Germany's ambassador in Kosovo, who wholeheartedly supported Hapësira throughout his three-year posting in the city, which ended in July 2020.

Germany and Kosovo have deep ties. An estimated 400,000 Kosovans live in Germany, and almost every Kosovan has relatives there, in Austria or in German-speaking areas of Switzerland. The patronage of the ambassador, and, by extension, of Germany itself, has been instrumental to Hapësira's growth, conferring a cultural validity in the eyes of Kosovo's government that it would otherwise have struggled to attain. At dinner, the closeness and mutual respect between the humble and engaging Ambassador Heldt and Hapësira's founders was clear and touching. The ambassador blushed and changed the subject when Dragaj and Badivuku began to eulogise about the many things he had done to help Hapësira survive and flourish. Despite having known Heldt personally for some time, Dragaj and Badivuku reverently addressed him as "Mr Ambassador" at all times.

"Hapësira stands for the development of a strong and independent grassroots cultural scene in Kosovo," Ambassador Heldt told me later. "So much is being done here in various fields of culture to bring people together and build a strong societal identity through sharing. That amazed me from the beginning of my tenure in Kosovo, and the electronic music scene is about exactly that: sharing and giving common ground to a young generation in a difficult environment. These people deserve every support from embassies and international actors, as many independent activities do not otherwise get the support they need." A meeting in February 2021 with the new ambassador, Jörn Rohde, confirmed his intention to continue Heldt's work in supporting Hapësira and the wider scene in Prishtina.

The Rilindja Warehouse is a gigantic former printing house and one of the most culturally and historically significant buildings in Kosovo due to its production of Albanian-language publications. Rilindja is where Yugoslavia's first Albanian-language newspaper was printed and many Albanian-language books, from 1976 until its closure in 2002, after which it lay vacant for several years. Dragaj and Badivuku told me they would undoubtedly have been evicted from Rilindja (which translates from Albanian as "Rebirth") a long time ago without Ambassador Heldt's backing. The long-term future of the space was unclear when I visited and remains so as of June 2021. The government is keen to repurpose it as an office or archive space, while Dragaj and Badivuku have been fighting for years to turn it into a permanent, multi-use club, venue and cultural space, which, if it happened, would be a real game changer for the city.

On the night I visited, commemorative photographs of the Berlin Wall—a child in a bright red jacket walking hand in hand with her mother; a couple kissing on the day it fell as East German guards look on—hung from the ceiling every few metres along a long, dimly lit corridor leading to the pounding beats and lasers filling Rilindja's main area. A full-size replica segment of the Wall stood at the back and two gigantic old printing presses loomed on either side of the dance floor, relics preserved to ensure Rilindja's history and significance to Kosovo-Albanians is never forgotten.

Ambassador Heldt, who I later discovered was a regular on the dance floor at Tresor in the early '90s, came to Rilindja with his daughter for the first couple of hours of the party. He seemed happy and at home as the other two German bookings for the night, Lux and Tobias., pounded out dark techno to a dense crowd of around 1,300 people.

As Answer Code Request got going, I was introduced to another member of the Hapësira collective, Era Buza, a young DJ with peroxide blonde hair and a deep love for industrial techno and EBM. Buza is from Prishtina but lives in the Albanian capital Tirana, where she works as a sound designer and graphic designer. She credits Hapësira with giving her the courage to DJ.

"I was only 20 when I joined them," she told me when I called her up for a more detailed (and audible) chat a few weeks later. "It was a huge honour for me because I was just a kid, but the guys saw something in me and supported and motivated me."

Sexist mindsets weighed heavily on her before she got Hapësira's backing. "When I first started to play music, it was a bit difficult because a lot of guys' attitudes were, 'you're just a girl, you must have someone helping you,' or 'people are just booking you because you're a girl.' I was really low because of that for a while, but then Uran and Arbnor came along and gave me the right kind of support. They pushed me to not stop and gave me the space to play." She shrugged and smiled. "I am not a provocative girl, so I don't try to push any radical or confrontational agenda. I just want to play music."

The word Hapësira means "space" in Albanian, and that concept is at the heart of what the night and the collective does. Prishtina is a city where "space" is at a premium in lots of ways, from its lack of green spaces to the paucity of dedicated clubs in which DJs and producers can hone their craft. But Hapësira's conception of the "space" they want to create goes well beyond this sort of literal definition, as Dragaj explained later.

"When we talk about lack of spaces, we don't necessarily mean just physical spaces," he said. "We also mean a lack of opportunities given to the youth of the city and beyond to express themselves in whatever they excel at. In our case, beyond the lack of an 'alternative' club space, we have noticed that gifted artists and promoters here don't have 'space' where they can build, develop and promote their talents, either physically or digitally. Beyond our very specific viewpoint, this lack of 'space' is also very apparent in all facets of daily life in Kosovo."

"We do everything we can to make sure Hapësira is much more than just a party," Badivuku added.

The sense of social and cultural mission at the heart of the enterprise is hard to miss. One of many examples is their Social Responsibility Fund, which they have run since 2016 to help low-income families in Kosovo. At Rilindja Warehouse, on the night I attended, the entrance fee of €15 fell to €10 if you brought a 1KG food donation. 600KG was donated in the end.

It was 6 AM, and after a breathless 36 hours, I had hit a wall. I took a last look over the still-packed warehouse of dancers losing it to Answer Code Request and departed safe in the knowledge that, while Hapësira is much more than just a party, it's also one hell of a good party.

The roots of the Kosovan love for clubs and electronic music extend much further back than in other formerly communist Eastern European nations. Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia's communist leader from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980, fell out with Joseph Stalin in 1948. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet-controlled Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in the same year and plotted its own non-aligned, relatively liberal path right up until the end of the Cold War.

Part of Tito's alternative vision was to allow western art and culture, including all kinds of music, to flow freely into the country, in sharp contrast to the severe censorship found in Soviet-aligned nations. "You can almost immediately tell the difference between someone who grew up in Yugoslavia in the 1980s and someone who grew up in the Soviet Bloc at the same time," Bersant Rizaj told me. I had asked Bersant, who co-ran Spray Club with a shifting cast of partners, including his cousin Genti, who I had met on my first night, to help me understand the current scene's historical context. With us in an airy bar opposite the Newborn monument was Toton Pllana, a respected DJ and producer who spent several years living in London as a teenager in the 1980s.

Both spent a lot of formative time as youngsters in the Kurrizi, a tunnel complex of small underground bars and clubs in the Dardania area of the city. The name translates from Albanian as "spine," in reference to its shape. Through the '80s and into the '90s, the Kurrizi was where Prishtina's youth could go to "experiment with themselves, their mind, sex, love and everything," recalls Ilir Bajri, a jazz composer, pianist and director of the Prishtina Jazz Festival, in a film made about the complex in 2017. The bars and clubs of the Kurrizi played all kinds of electronic music plus jazz, rock, new wave, pop and more, and hosted regular live gigs and even the occasional dance competition, now immortalised in YouTube footage so exquisitely grainy and distorted it could be a transmission from another planet. Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode, Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 are a few of the bands Bersant remembered hearing for the first time at the Kurrizi, while Pllana recalled trips there as a young child.

"New wave was a really big thing in the former Yugoslavia, and you could hear a lot of it at the Kurrizi in the early '80s," Pllana told me. "I must have been about ten years old when I first went there—my sister's friend was a DJ in one of the bars. I was a metalhead, so I was never much into new wave, but you could hear punk and metal at the Kurrizi too. It was always at the centre of Prishtina's subculture. Then, during the dark apartheid years in the early '90s, it served as a meeting point for artists and political movements alike."

The Kurrizi bars and clubs eventually closed down under the increasing weight of oppression from the Serbian police, who would regularly raid it and beat people simply for being there. By then, however, as Bersant put it, the Kurrizi had "built the fundamental musical and cultural base for a generation of youngsters in Prishtina".

Equally significant as the Kurrizi was the ability of Kosovans to travel, another notably liberal feature of Tito's brand of communism. "We had a good quality of life in Yugoslavia," Pllana told me. "Travelling was simple. You didn't need a visa to visit London or Paris or anywhere else in western Europe."

So it's harder for Kosovans to travel now than it was under communism? "Infinitely harder," he nodded ruefully.

Bersant took up the story: "Prishtina's connection with London is the other thing that is important if you want to understand how we were able to form such a bond with electronic music. A lot of young Kosovans went to live in London in the '80s, and many cassettes, CDs and records of music that would probably have been too obscure to find its way here otherwise were sent back from London. That's how a lot of the best stuff became known."

Local rock and pop music inspired by the sounds of the west flourished in the '80s, too. Prominent on the scene was the rock band Oda, whose lead singer was Dukagjin Lipa, father of Dua Lipa, now one of the world's biggest pop stars. The Lipa family are friends with several of the people I met in Prishtina—Bersant later showed me a photograph of a beaming, pre-fame Dua with his two young children—and Dua's success is a source of huge national pride for the country. Communist Yugoslavia's first real pop star, Zana Nimani is Kosovo-Albanian, and internationally famous contemporary singers Rita Ora, Bebe Rexha and Era Istrefi are all Kosovan or of Kosovo-Albanian heritage. It adds up to an impressive footprint on modern music for a country of just 1.8 million people.

It's a cruel twist that the end of communism, which (theoretically at least) gave people in the rest of Eastern Europe the opportunity to broaden their cultural horizons, ended up eroding the previously liberal and creative atmosphere in Prishtina. Large gatherings of Kosovo-Albanians were viewed as a threat by Milošević's Serbian police under what is repeatedly described as the "apartheid regime" of the '90s by those who lived under it.

"Hip-hop really struck a chord with us during those days," Bersant remembers. "Rappers were talking about racial discrimination and abuse by the police in the US. Kosovo-Albanians were living under the same thing here, so the lyrics spoke to us." He told me that some small, low-budget bars run by "people with enormous enthusiasm and lots of knowledge about underground electronic music" did manage to stay open, but that "recognisable large-scale clubbing gatherings" only began after 1999.

Progress was swift after the war ended. A few friends of Pllana's opened a place called Underclub in 2000, which concentrated mainly on Detroit techno, London tech house and funky techno from Naples. "There were a couple of other clubs then—MhZ and Radio Club—but Underclub was the place that started underground clubbing here immediately after the war." In Underclub and, from 2004, Spray, Prishtina had dedicated spaces in which the scene could develop.

"Kosovo still wasn't a safe place to be when we first opened Spray," Bersant explained. "Evil Eddie Richards, Grant Dell, Dave Mothersole, Terry Francis and Nathan Coles were the first DJs from the UK who had the guts to come here, and then others followed."

An enduring bond was formed between Spray and the Croydon tech house scene embodied by those DJs. Artists who later played at Spray included LTJ Bukem, James Holden, M.A.N.D.Y., Guy Gerber and Swayzak. Bersant reserves special affection for Richards and Mothersole. "They became sort of our resident DJs and would play for us up to six times a year," he smiled. "Whoever else we booked, those boys were always the crowd's favourites."

With the rigours of the weekend out of the way, I was finding time to do some exploring. I lingered outside the National Library, where flocks of migrating birds swooped and dove in formation as the sun set on a chilly autumn afternoon. On Mother Teresa Boulevard, the main pedestrianised shopping thoroughfare, is a statue of Skanderbeg, a 15th-century Albanian nobleman who fought the Ottomans while they ruled Kosovo from 1455 to 1912. At the other end of the street, opposite the dilapidated carbuncle of Prishtina's Grand Hotel, is a statue of a fallen KLA commander, Zahir Pajaziti. Above the statue, the Albanian flag—a double-headed black dragon on a red background—and Kosovo's flag, its yellow stars on blue deliberately echoing the flag of the EU, fluttered together in the breeze.

The England football team were due in town soon for a Euro 2020 qualifier, and all along Mother Teresa Boulevard banners had been hung bearing the flags of England and Kosovo and the words "Welcome and respect." Later in the week, I noticed a large billboard depicting the England players Fabian Delph, Raheem Sterling and Danny Rose, along with the words "Welcome, brothers!" Gratitude for the UK's part in the 1999 intervention still runs very deep. My friend Nick Ames was in Prishtina to cover the match for the Guardian, and was asked by a source with extensive knowledge of both countries: "How often can it genuinely be said that one nation holds love this deep for another?"

On a side street off Mother Teresa Boulevard is Soma Book Station, a bar and restaurant that's an unofficial clubhouse for Prishtina's electronic music scene, with a small record-selling concession. On the first of many visits there, I met Nart Orana, one of around a dozen members of Hapësira who have loose, ad-hoc roles in the collective. "My main job is to disagree with Arbnor and Uran," he laughed when I asked him for details of his involvement. Orana, instantly likeable and highly intelligent with a skater look and great taste in memes, was a fountain of knowledge throughout.

"Given the visa situation right now, it is probably more fun to come and experience the scene in Prishtina as an outsider than to be one of the people in the middle of it," he said. Orana was the first of many to describe electronic music as "transport" by other means: a way to soak up some of the experiences and knowledge those with more fortunate citizenship can get by travelling.

"Bars and clubs are pretty much the only things young people have to escape their boredom in Kosovo," Orana continued. "Because of that and the difficulties we have with travelling, the people involved are putting their all into making Prishtina as good as it can be." Orana's commitment to the city's scene was obvious. "There isn't much money for equipment here, so the parties all share the same three sets of CDJs," he told me. "And I can tell you which set is which just by touching the different cracks and scratches on each."

One of the best and longest-running examples of this determination to make good on Kosovo's situation is Dokufest, a week-long short-film and documentary festival in the picturesque old city of Prizren, an hour's drive southwest of Prishtina. Started in 2002, Dokufest was one of the first significant buds of cultural revival to appear after the war, and is considered by many to be the single most important cultural development to date in postwar Kosovo. A huge array of filmmakers and film enthusiasts from around the world descend on the city for it every August. A successful online edition was held last summer in response to the pandemic, and the plan is for the festival to return properly this August. Around 250 films are screened at each edition in normal times—this in a city that didn't have one cinema when DokuFest started and now has ten. The festival also has a production arm. Home, a provocative short about the refugee crisis co-produced by the festival, won a BAFTA in 2017.

In the last few years, DokuNights, a concurrent programme of live music and club events, has flourished and now matches the stature of the film festival. "When you're there, you feel like you're in on a fantastic secret," Jane Fitz, who played back-to-back with DJ Nobu at the 2019 edition, told me. "It's amazingly well-attended, the production levels are really high, and the venues are used imaginatively and sympathetically. I was able to stay for a few days last year and really enjoyed it—seeing Caterina Barbieri in a crumbling old theatre during a biblical rainstorm was pretty special."

Nita Deda joined Dokufest's video department in her early 20s and was festival director from 2016 to 2019. She gave me a fuller picture of the importance of Dokufest and DokuNights as we ate mezze and drank red wine at a bodega-style restaurant called Baba Ghanoush. "For a generation of young people here, including myself, summer in Kosovo is Dokufest," Deda said. "It was everything to me before I worked with them. Eventually, I went to them and offered to do anything they needed me to do, and we went from there. Some years we would have 700 people applying for the 150 volunteer positions we had available—kids would be coming to us crying because they were so desperate to be involved."

"Having an internationally renowned event like this is so important for us because of our isolation," she continued, "and because our artists find it so difficult to get out and perform internationally. Dokufest is what we do instead of travelling. People here are so hungry for engagement with the rest of the world, and the festival is a way to make that possible, it opens so many alternative channels of communication for us."

Along with Barbieri on 2019's DokuNights bill (there was no concurrent online edition of DokuNights in 2020) were Legowelt, Batu and Josey Rebelle, and a film/music performance from the Lebanese producer Rabih Beaini, AKA Morphosis, in collaboration with the Prizren jazz singer Agona Shporta. The Prishtina-based queer and feminist party Bijat curated the opening night, bringing France's Coucou Chloe and London's Shygirl together with the Kosovan artists Matale and Galouche. Several nights are given over each year to curation by other emerging local collectives and platforms such as Angry Youth and No Recess.

"We always try to have the international and local artists work together," Deda added, "and so many good things have come out of that." Ticket prices are extremely low—€2 to see a film and the same for any of the music events—so as to be affordable in a country where the average monthly salary is €500 and youth unemployment runs at around 60 percent.

Sitting across from Deda was Patrik Ukiq, a party curator and organiser who Deda enlisted to co-programme DokuNights when she became festival director in 2016. Ukiq, who is around the same age as Deda, with a dark beard and an ever-present smile, co-runs Servis and Servis Invites with a local DJ named Leo Lumezi. Servis is a monthly night focusing on EBM, industrial and "trancey, psychedelic techno," while the remit of Servis Invites extends to "anyone we really like and want to book." Previous guests at the former have included Steve Murphy, Imre Kiss, Randomer, Dona AKA DJ Plant Texture, Alessandro Adriani and Phuong-Dan. Servis Invites has welcomed Jus-Ed, Margie, Neil Landstrumm, Sentimental Rave and Wata Igarashi.

As Ukiq put it, the primary goal of Servis and Servis Invites is "to create an independent, gradual movement that creates change through sound, activism and the sensations of the dance floor. We want to cultivate a caring and non-judgmental environment where self-expression, self-liberation and mutual respect is not only possible but deeply rooted, and we always look to unearth new local and regional talents as well as bringing in international guests."

In common with many nights in Prishtina, Servis and Servis Invites have no permanent home, though just prior to the pandemic several editions had been held in part of the Palace Of Youth And Sports. Ukiq also co-organises the small, much-loved 24-hour mini-festival RE:FORM. It brings exclusively Balkan artists to a beautiful spot in the countryside outside Prishtina, and Ukiq describes it as more of a "crew gathering" than a festival. More than one person I talked to during my stay singled out Ukiq as uncommonly dedicated in his pursuit of a good party. Ukiq always keeps the capacity at his parties down to around 3-400, the level he believes gives the perfect mix of atmosphere and intimacy.

Ukiq lived and worked in Belgrade for several years before returning to Prishtina four years ago. He knows the two cities equally well. "I was always inspired by other cities in Europe, but mostly by Belgrade as I lived there," he said. "The music scene is more developed there, but I wouldn't compare it with Prishtina because the two cities have totally different energies. But it would be good for Prishtina to have a club that runs as Drugstore and 20/44 in Belgrade do. By that, I mean the idea of activism through clubbing, which is what these places have built and what I am doing with Servis. I think music has tremendous power to transcend political and ethnic lines and break down the kind of barriers that stand between people from Kosovo and Serbia."

Ukiq has been busy during the pandemic, and he and Lumezi realised a longtime dream in December by opening Servis Fantazia, a multipurpose listening bar with a Funktion-One soundsystem. Servis Fantzia flourished during the winter and spring despite Covid-19 restrictions requiring bars to close at 8 PM, with DJs playing for four to six hours a day. Restrictions have now been eased, and the place is set to go from strength to strength during the summer and beyond.

Deda's decision to leave Dokufest was largely brought on by the desire to concentrate on a new project, Andrrat Moderne. Organised alongside her friend Rina Meta, it will include club nights and other music events in collaboration with Ukiq, as well as video, book and zine publishing. It launched just over a year ago with a hugely successful New Year's Eve party at the Palace Of Youth And Sports headlined by Peder Mannerfelt. On March 6th, 2020, Andrrat Moderne's second party featured D.Tiffany, Tirana's Besa M and SVEN, a 22-year-old local who Meta describes as a "prodigy." It proved to be the last party in Prishtina before lockdown.

Deda and Meta have pressed on with other endeavours under the Andrrat Moderne banner during the pandemic. The pair directed a haunting music video for a song by Shpat Deda that was written at one of their afterparties. Another big project is a collaboration with Vjosa Shala, erstwhile frontwoman of TERROR, Prishtina's first all-women metal band. TERROR were well known during the war, and Shala is a noted, charismatic activist and artist. Deda discovered journals written by her between 1988 and 1998, and she and Meta have published them on the just-launched digital platform Two Journals, with a physical book to follow in collaboration with the Zurich publisher Cpress. Deda and Meta are both war children who remember all too well the horrors of Kosovo in the 1990s. "It is a sensitive work," Deda told me. "It is our way of making sense of our upbringing."

Also on Andrrat's Moderne's NYE 2020 bill was Genc Elezaj, a gregarious, dedicated young DJ and producer. Elezaj is not a member of any of Prishtina's collectives, preferring to see anyone doing interesting things on the scene as his colleague. "I'm not independent because I want to distance myself from others," he said, "but because I want to help everyone if I can. At every gig or club night I am usually there carrying speakers or whatever else needs to be done. I like the party to be good whoever is doing it and whoever is playing. The city is so small and everybody knows everybody, so it's good to share things and share our efforts. The way I see it, we're all growing together."

Soon after I met him, Elezaj uploaded an hour-long mix of highlights from a 12-hour set he had played at Rina Meta's engagement party. Tracks by Gesloten Cirkel, Chaos In The CBD, Jus-Ed, Underground Resistance and Florian Kupfer roll by, perfectly capturing the simple pleasure of a bunch of friends celebrating together.

"For us the internet is even more important in discovering this sort of stuff than in other countries," Elezaj said when I complimented him on his track selection. "It's the single most important thing, and I honestly find the process really fulfilling. You can go and find what people were doing in electronic music all the way back to the 1960s, and I love digging into it. The internet has really helped the youth in this country, it's a way to stay connected to the world." Kosovo leads the region in per-capita internet access, with 86 percent of the country's households online at the last count. Describing the internet as a lifeline for Kosovans would not have been hyperbolic even before the pandemic, but now it is truer than ever.

In a week of enriching encounters, a real standout was my visit to Termokiss, an oasis-like community centre housed in a former power plant on a little patch of land surrounded by busy roads. Opened in 2016 and run by a collective of around 20, Termokiss is a beautiful example of how an active, collaborative community can triumph over adversity. Colourful, hand-painted signs and bright-red window frames contrast vividly with the oppressive greyness of the building. Inside I found more colour and a lovely buzz of activity: kids played table tennis in the centre of the large ground-floor area as a friendly grey dog, one of four living at Termokiss when I visited, padded over to greet me. Musical instruments, art materials, photographs and heaving bookshelves lined the walls, and in a co-working area half a dozen people tapped away on laptops.

One of Termokiss's many roles is as a provider of workshops, teaching everything from woodwork to art to electronic music production. "Termokiss is a stepping-stone for anyone here who wants to practice or learn about something specific," Orana told me. "You can learn about things there that extend way beyond music, but from my point of view, when I was trying to make my own electronic music around ten years ago I would have killed to have had Termokiss to go and learn at."

Eljesa Beka, AKA SVEN, the young DJ who played at Andrrat Moderne in March, is a member of the collective. She did have the chance to learn at Termokiss, and credits it with teaching her to produce electronic music on software and hardware, to set up soundsystems and, of course, to DJ. "All of these things are provided here," she told me, "and they also provide the opportunity to perform what you have learned in front of a supportive audience."

I sat down for a cup of tea with a few members of the collective, including Gent Thaçi, a gentle, soulful man with an intense desire to communicate what Termokiss is about. "Parties can be a manifestation of our needs and accomplishments, but by having this space we are learning every day that the sense of belonging we were searching for in a rave can be built in everyday life," Thaçi said. "With our workshops part of what we want to do is decentralise culture and education, to allow individuals to use Termokiss as a tool and learn how to create events or exhibitions or whatever they want to do. Then we want to give them the space to show what they have learned. Termokiss has ramped up its social and cultural mission during the pandemic. Many activities and workshops have moved online, but all kinds of in-person cultural events (always held in line with government guidelines) have carried on. It has also responded to more immediate human needs by organising free food for those in need and holding mental health-focused events and discussions.

"The longer they deny us visas, the better it gets here," Thaçi added with more than a hint of defiance. "Termokiss is a mode of transport. In a country without visas to travel we believe it is up to us to create quality of life here instead of seeking it elsewhere."

Along with poetry nights, live music and other events, Termokiss hosts electronic music parties, and many of the DJs and promoters I met in the city have been or are involved. The Prishtina scene's dense lattice of connections was never more apparent to me than when I happened to mention Termokiss to Philipp Kleiner, a member of Ambassador Heldt's team at the German embassy, in the course of setting up an interview with the ambassador.

"Oh, I have a night at Termokiss!" Kleiner exclaimed before revealing his double life away from the diplomatic service, which he pursues under the name DJ Smaller. "It is called Shirit, which is the Albanian word for 'tape.' It's a monthly night where I play cassette-only sets, and we encourage people to bring along old tapes from their parents—old Balkan folk music or Yugoslavian pop or whatever they can find—and we play them. Together we discover musical treasures that survived the war." A mixtape inspired by Shirit that Kleiner made in December for the blog frekvencii.org gives a great flavour of what the nights are about.

The depth of Prishtina's electronic music ecosystem became clearer to me after I left as interesting new tips and connections continued to flood in. There was Oda Haliti, whose thoughts I later sought on the 1999 Love Parade video. Haliti is an internationally touring DJ (visa and pandemic-permitting) who previously ran Gegë, a bar she used as a platform for a wide range of events aimed at establishing the idea of bars as a safe space for women. There was Gent Gjonbalaj, a young DJ, promoter and label-owner who also co-runs Orb Mag, an online magazine dedicated to alternative music, art, culture, and technology. There were collectives such as Angry Youth, Bijat and No Recess, who curated parts of DokuNights in 2019. Vakuum, a well-regarded online platform and crew of event organisers, promoters and artists, and Totem, another night focused on EBM and dark techno.

Prishtina has talented producers and DJs making and playing every conceivable stripe of dance music, and a long history as one of the region's musical hotbeds. It's full of people who are determined to make the best of the political situation they find themselves in, both by making the city the best it can be and by finding and nurturing channels of communication with the outside world. With all this bubbling away, the final piece in the puzzle (aside from an end to the pandemic) is obvious: a sizeable, high-quality club, open every weekend, dedicated to giving artists the space to hone their craft and the scene space to evolve.

Currently, the city's most notable dedicated club is a place called Zone. It largely concentrates on Romanian minimal, a sound that resonates with many in Prishtina. An exception to the prevailing sound at Zone is Episode, a techno-focused night that had been running for 17 years by the time the pandemic hit. "Rominimal is pretty much the only sound we never play at Episode," laughed its founder Lirak Hamiti. Episode booked international guests until around a decade ago but now concentrates on its residents Besa M (who also appeared at Andrrat Moderne's March party) and Çuç, among other locals.

Aside from Zone, there's Klubi M, a bar with a garden that Era Buza described to me as "not really a club, but at least somewhere we can all get together and play music," and, as of December, Servis Fantazia, a major step forward for the scene but more of a bar than a club. After that, you're down to a couple of improvised areas in the Palace Of Youth And Sports and Rilindja: interesting places to stage nights but none of them a permanent club, at least not for the time being.

At the moment, Hapësira has the best chance of turning this aspiration into a reality. Looking back on the conversations I had in Prishtina, I remembered Nart Orana—he whose job it is to disagree with the collective's founders—mentioning Tbilisi as a model for Prishtina's electronic music scene.

"I've seen parallels between Tbilisi and Prishtina for a while," he said. "But in particular, the way the whole scene in Tbilisi came together when the police raided Bassiani reminded me of the togetherness we have here. We have everything in place to emulate what they have done in Tbilisi, apart from a permanent club like Bassiani. If Uran and Arbnor win the fight for Rilindja Warehouse, we'll have our own Bassiani. Then there will be no limit to how good Prishtina's scene can become."