When the owner of an underground club in Kiev approached Western musicians to play in Ukraine, long before the war, there were not so many players.
But an American from Boston, Mirza Ramic, accepted the invitation, forming a lasting friendship with the club’s owner, Taras Kimczak.
“I kept coming back,” Mr. Ramic, 40, said in an interview at the club, Mezzanine, where he was preparing for a show during a recent tour of Ukraine.
The country, he said, “is one of the places that have welcomed me the most and been the most supportive of my music.” And so especially after the Russian invasion two years ago, he added: “I wanted to come now, to show my support in these difficult times.”
Mr. Ramic, born in Bosnia, is himself a child of war. At 11, he lost his father in the bombing of his hometown, Mostar, and spent years as a refugee, moving from country to country with his mother as she struggled to find a way to survive.
They lived in Zagreb, Croatia. Tunis; and Prague, before moving to the United States, first to Arizona and finally to Boston. There, he finished his education and began a career as a musician, forming an electronic band, Arms and Sleepers, with a college friend, Max Lewis.
Now a solo musician, he returned to play in Kiev and two other cities in the fall, undeterred by the threat of missile strikes, giving free concerts as a personal pledge to stand by his Ukrainian fans.
“Arts and culture during war is one of the most important things that keeps people going because it gives them a sense of human dignity,” Mr Ramic said. “They are also entitled to it in difficult times.”
Mr. Ramic also has many Russian admirers — as well as Russian friends, including his supporter in Moscow, who fled their country in protest at the war in Ukraine. He said he tried to imagine the dilemma in his own context, how he would feel as a Bosniak against a Serb who was against the war. But since the invasion, he said, he has decided not to play in Russia out of respect for the Ukrainians.
“To go there, symbolically, at this time, would not be right,” he said.
The only constant in his life has been music and it has become his main tool in navigating his traumatic life experiences. In the interview he spoke eloquently about his life as a refugee and immigrant, about the loss of his father and about his sense of alienation and not belonging anywhere.
“For me music is a way to deal with these difficult core memories,” she said. “At the root, that’s it.”
His mother, Selma, a piano teacher, taught him classical piano throughout their refugee odyssey and hoped that Mr. Ramic would become a concert pianist. But in his teens, he gave up his daily four hours of piano practice to focus on his studies and turned to playing piano and keyboards in high school and college bands.
He studied Eastern European history and politics at Bowdoin College, Maine, and international relations in a graduate program at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, driven by a desire to understand the geopolitics that is the background of his life.
However, he came to face his own pain in the process. In “To Tell a Ghost,” a short documentary he made several years ago, he described the shock he felt when class discussion turned to the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
“I remember sitting in class, drinking my coffee – like everyone else – and suddenly I just froze inside,” he said in the film. He couldn’t join the conversation, he said.
In between, he played in a rock band and in 2006 formed Arms and Sleepers with Mr Lewis. It was a special partnership, he said, between Mr. Ramic, who was born a Muslim, and Mr. Lewis, who is Jewish and now teaches ethics at Yale University. The band’s name reflects Mr Ramic’s view of the war in Bosnia, referring to the many who took up arms and others who did little to stop it. “People were sleeping,” he said.
He was 9 years old when war broke out in Mostar as Serbian forces battled Croat and Bosnian militants for control of the city. His memories are visceral.
“The skies are full of rockets,” he said in the interview. “We had a tank that rolled into our driveway, next to our house.” He remembers watching the tank from the kitchen window. “That was horror.”
As the fighting intensified, his father, Ibritsa, a dentist, sent his wife and son out with a refugee convoy of women and children. He stayed in Mostar to take care of their property and was killed the following year, in September 1993, when a mortar shell landed on the street outside their home.
The loss of his father, with whom he was very close, remains a defining trauma for Mr. Ramic. That took him away from his hometown, and he still struggles with a deep sadness and sometimes depression, he said.
This led him recently to advise some Ukrainian friends not to join the army. “You will be more useful to your country alive,” he told them. “And for the next generation of people, like your child, they will be in a much healthier and stronger state to make a difference if you stay alive.”
If his father had survived, he probably would have returned to Bosnia, Mr. Ramic said. His best friend from childhood survived the war in Bosnia and still lives in Mostar, working and raising a family, but Mr Ramic, an American citizen, said he doubted he would return to live there.
“It’s very difficult emotionally,” he said. “I’m kind of in between. I don’t really feel American, I don’t feel Bosnian.”
He and his mother returned to Mostar for visits, including in September for the 30th anniversary of his father’s death. Much of the town remains in ruins, he said, and they have never restored their family home. The roof was repaired with European aid, but his father’s dental equipment and other belongings lie untouched, covered in dust, as they were the day he died.
Mr. Ramic moved to Berlin in 2020 and spends time in other European countries — composing in Latvia during the pandemic and in Spain organizing aid for Ukraine in February 2022 at the start of the invasion. Europe feels closer to his roots than America, he said.
“A lot of the music I make – and maybe that’s why it resonates with people in places like Ukraine – is that it’s kind of in between,” he said. “It’s about belonging or not belonging and figuring out who you are, and maybe realizing that you’re just you and that’s it.”
His music is electronic, accompanied by cinematic videos that combine documentary footage with kaleidoscopic, computer-generated electronic graphics, often with a strong political message. He often confronts the violence and tragedy around him—from his time working with at-risk youth on Chicago’s South Side, to the Black Lives Matter protests, to the war in Ukraine since its first inception in 2014, when separatists seized the authority in part of the eastern region of the country.
With 13 albums under his belt, he has a devoted following and has found a way to make a living from his music. He performed, dancing wildly over his keyboards, to a crowd of 200 at Mezzanine, a club housed in an old Soviet textile factory in Kiev. Some in the audience were his Facebook fans and knew his music, but others came to see a rare American willing to play in wartime Ukraine.
His music is urgent and intense, but there are also calm pieces influenced by the environment. A fan at the concert in Kiev, an IT engineer who gave only her first name, Yana, said she listened to his music when she walked to forget the stress of war.
“It takes you to a moment where you’re neither sad nor happy but just in balance,” he said.
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Kyiv.
