Thievery Corporation in Belgrade on July 18 - the Washington downtempo duo on a tour marking 30 years

Thirty years after two guys from Washington started mixing dub, bossa nova and electronica in a basement lounge, Thievery Corporation are landing in Belgrade. On July 18 the open-air cinema at Luka Beograd, in the Open Air Corner section, hosts the American duo on their 30th-anniversary tour. Just one hop across the border for anyone in Skopje for whom downtempo means something more than elevator music.

Rob Garza and Eric Hilton founded the band in 1995 as an outlet for a shared love of acid jazz, dub reggae and Brazilian rhythms. Their home base was Hilton's club, the Eighteenth Street Lounge, where late-night DJ sessions gave birth to the debut Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi in 1997. The real breakthrough came with the second album The Mirror Conspiracy and the single Lebanese Blond, a track that has since threaded its way through films, ads and the playlists of an entire generation. From there on, they became one of the names that defined a whole genre.

What sets them apart isn't a single sound, but their refusal to sit in one drawer. In a single evening they'll move through trip-hop, reggae, Indian classical and electronica, with a rotating cast of vocalists and instrumentalists on stage. Their concerts are more of a collective than a band - a living, slow-smouldering machine that pulls you in rather than assaulting you. Which is exactly why an open-air stage by the Danube is the right frame for them.

The show at Luka Beograd starts at 20:00, and tickets are on sale through tickets.rs. For a Belgrade summer with music that's in no hurry to get anywhere, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better address - and harder still to find the region often getting a performer of this calibre without having to travel to some big Western European festival.