Grandmaster Flash plays Gala Hala in Ljubljana on October 9. The man who literally invented the techniques DJing rests on comes to Metelkova as part of the Rapetek Ekstra series, joined by DJs Zeds and Ninja.

Born Joseph Saddler in 1958 in Barbados and raised in the South Bronx, Flash is not a nostalgic name from early hip-hop history but an inventor. He developed the quick mix and backspin techniques, that is, the way a DJ pulls a record back by hand to hold the same beat. It sounds like a technical footnote, but it is precisely the foundation every hip-hop set is built on to this day, forty-five years later.

With the group Furious Five he recorded "The Message" in 1982, a song that pulled hip-hop out of the party and turned it into social commentary on life in New York. That record is what carried a genre many had until then written off as a passing fashion. The original line-up featured, alongside Flash, Melle Mel, Kid Creole, Scorpio, Rahiem and Keef Cowboy.

Tickets cost 30 euros through mojekarte.hr, and the concert starts at 20:00. Gala Hala is a club inside the Metelkova autonomous centre, a room holding a few hundred people, which means a figure of this weight will play at a distance he would never come near an audience in bigger cities.