Klemen Klemen at Letni vrt in Ljubljana on September 10 - 33 years of Metelkova with the man behind Trnow Stajl

Klemen Klemen plays Letni vrt in Metelkova, Ljubljana on September 10, at the celebration of the 33rd anniversary of the Metelkova mesto autonomous centre. This is no accidental pairing: the rapper who recorded Slovenia's most important hip-hop album and the space where that scene grew up are part of the same story.

Born in Ljubljana in 1977, Klemen Klemen started rapping at thirteen, and in English at first. The turn came in 2000, when he signed with Nika Records and released the album "Trnow Stajl". That record is still regarded as one of the most influential mainstream hip-hop releases in Slovenia, and the tracks "Keš Pičke" and "Jst sm umrl" are part of an entire generation's vocabulary.

After "Trnow Stajl" came "Hipnoza" in 2003 and "S3p" in 2015. That is a career without the usual regional pattern of an album every other year, and in his case the scarcity raised rather than lowered the weight of a live show. The crowd that turns up at his Metelkova concerts knows exactly what it is getting, and why it does not come around often.

Tickets cost 20 euros through mojekarte.hr, with doors at 20:00. Letni vrt is the open-air part of Gala Hala, meaning a concert under the sky on a September Ljubljana night, inside a complex that went from military barracks to the best-known autonomous cultural space in the region.