The Open Belarusian Electronic Music Awards were held for the first time in January–February 2020, when the awards for 2019 were presented. The award was started by ordinary party-goers who simply care. The idea came from the author of the instagram account @technozen, Iuliya Moshkareva; four more people (Arnold, Misha, Lera and Sergei) helped bring the raw idea to life, risking their own reputations.
Today the TZ team is Iuliya Moshkareva, Arnold Gukasyan and Elizaveta Grazhevskaya.
We don’t claim that our initiative should be treated as a professional award — we have different goals.
(in short)
TO THANK + TO UNDERSTAND + TO CONNECT
Goals of the Award
- To thank the people who put in the work.
and brought people joy more often than others this past year.
- To find out what the people who go out a lot really think
what they like, whose names are on everyone’s lips
- to try to figure out for ourselves what’s going on
and to show the rest of the community how much is happening in Belarus.
We know that we know nothing )
- to give feedback to musicians and organizers.
so they can see whether ordinary party-goers get their message right, what slips past them, and where the real gaps are )
- To draw party-goers into a deeper, more mindful discussion.
trading opinions in the smoking area is great, but it’s not enough.
- To introduce the audiences of different projects to one another and make them friends.
otherwise they keep side-eyeing each other, as if they don’t realize we’re all in the same boat )
- To get the Minsk crowd to notice what’s happening in other cities.
because hardly anyone has looked beyond the ring road )
In general, all our goals can be summed up by one common aim — “developing the scene”. Of course, for now we look at this rather one-sidedly, sorry about that, but in the end you can only start building what you want to strive for out of what already exists.
So the award is just a snapshot of the mood of a particular audience at a particular moment in time, and does not claim to be the ultimate truth.
If someone sees that we missed something in some area, hit a dead end or got it wrong — please don’t take offence, we don’t mean any harm. We’ll be genuinely glad if you explain it to us. You can sulk in silence forever.