Making Music in Switzerland

Let me be honest about what making music in Switzerland actually means. I'm Swiss-Serbian, based in Lausanne, and I write in English. None of those three make it easier. The country is small, the scene inside it smaller, and English-language indie out of a French-speaking city is not the local specialty. People assume Switzerland is a music industry the way it's a banking industry. It isn't. There's no machine sitting here waiting to pick you up.

What there is, though, is real. A handful of venues, a few promoters who genuinely care, a scatter of artists doing the same stubborn thing you are. You start recognising faces. The person running sound at one show turns up on bass at the next. It's tight and a little incestuous and mostly kind. When it's that small nobody's pretending to be bigger than they are, and there's something honest in that. You can't fake your way through a room of forty people who all know each other.

The language thing is its own puzzle. Lausanne is French, my head is a mix of a few places, and the songs come out in English. So I'm slightly foreign to everyone. Too English for the French circuit, too Swiss for anyone abroad, too Serbian for the tidy version of either. For a long time I treated that as a problem to solve. Now I think it's just the sound. «5 to 9» came out of exactly that in-between feeling, and somewhere in the making I stopped apologising for it.

Money and time are the quiet part nobody prints on the poster. I've got a finance day job. Most people I respect here have something similar, a shift, a class they teach, a contract that covers rent. Switzerland is expensive, so music is either a hobby you fund or a business you can't quite afford. I've spent ten years playing live, mostly guitar, real instruments, going back and forth to Stockholm and Geneva to actually record. The album got made in the hours the job didn't want.

If you're a young artist here wondering whether it's worth it, I won't sell you a dream. Nobody gets discovered walking down a street in Lausanne. But you do get to make the thing you actually mean, with no label breathing down your neck about singles and streams. The smallness that looks like a wall is also a kind of freedom. Nobody's expecting a hit, so you're free to just tell the truth. That's rarer than it sounds.

So this is where I am. A Serbian name, a Swiss address, English songs, a job that starts at nine. I self-released «5 to 9» from here and I'd do it the same way again. The scene didn't hand me anything, but it let me be exactly what I am, which turns out to be enough to keep going.