by Carla-Isabella Dunger
Back in 2020, in a small room in Hamburg’s St. Georg neighborhood, I sat with 15 people, all at least 40 years older than me, to see a live musical performance. My mother was actually the one who found this concert, described as a “one-man electronic accordion” show.
It was indeed one man, playing on an electric accordion. At first, his music was quite classical, but then it built into looping bass and, near the end, something closer to techno.
That memory stayed with me. I could not have known then that one day I’d sit across from Nenad Akkordeon to talk about his art, his politics, and his musical life.
Watch him on YouTube. Better yet, go see him live.
In a typical performance, he has twelve kilos of accordion strapped over his shoulders and plays multiple parts on it all at once. Melody with his right hand, bass and chords with his left. Sweat runs down his face.
His real name is Nenad Nikolić, but he’s known onstage as Nenad Akkordeon, and he tells me he’s the only person doing this anywhere.
How does someone become the first and only one doing something in music?
First, how did the accordion end up defining your life?
Nenad Akkordeon grew up in Serbia, and he says the accordion is deeply woven into Serbian culture. His father and grandfather both played the accordion as a side job at weddings.
“Good bread on the side” is how he describes it. When I ask him to explain that, he says he can’t; it’s just a Serbian phrase people say about accordion music.
He’s the first in the family to make the instrument his primary profession. “My father is very proud of that.”
His training was very strict. “If you don’t practice, you’re out.” At 17, he did a music competition and delivered a full program, 44 pages, all memorized.
“That was already very serious,” he says. “And that’s how I became a good accordionist.”
He says being good at the accordion in Serbia means mostly playing in pubs.
“You’re a musician, and you’ve spent your whole childhood in serious practice,” he says. “Then you end up in front of some guy who thinks he owns the world. But whoever pays, pays.”
Why did you move to Germany?
In the mid-2000s, he moved to Kassel, a mid-sized university city in central Germany, to study the accordion more professionally.
I was so enthusiastic about Germany because it was so left. I finally found myself, and I found I was someone who wants to love other people.
In his studies, he met Jenny, who eventually became his wife. She studied guitar, and they’ve built their lives around music ever since.
What was life in Kassel like?
He moved to the city in his twenties and worked at McDonald’s for almost three years to support his studies. By then, he says, he had stopped believing the classical accordion could support him in Germany, so he took a second degree in choral conducting. Within a year, his schedule had grown into leading three choirs a week, an income the accordion just couldn’t promise.
I was always psychologically at the end, on the ground. Always just fighting.
In 2013, he moved to Hamburg. There, in his late twenties, on the hunt for some stability, he found his first rave.
Raving felt good right away. I recovered mentally from all those exhausting years. I felt great, as a raver and as a visitor.
Around the same time, one of his own accordion students introduced him to the electronic accordion.
He was skeptical. “I told my student that the real accordion will never be replaced by the electronic one.” Then he started toying with it, and gradually his mind changed.
The sound is just that real.
On rave nights in Hamburg, he never stayed out past three or four in the morning.
I believe the peak of any party is around three. After around three or four, that perfect atmosphere is gone.
That’s when his practice sessions started: home by half past three, headphones on, with the electronic accordion.
“You just experiment. You switch the timbres, switch the effects, try them, and somewhere, something happens, so you repeat it.” He remembers a special moment in one of these late-night sessions: “Suddenly I saw myself with the accordion, standing where the DJ stands.”
Then, pausing our talk, he gets up, walks across the room, and brings me the instrument itself, so I can see it close-up.
He tries to explain how it works, but it’s a bit over my head. He stresses this point: he plays electronic music on the accordion without using any loops, samples, or any form of automatic chord accompaniment.
After some technical details about the different channels, he tells me:
I can’t describe the feeling. Truly rich, truly heavenly. Butterflies in my stomach, a thousand feelings of happiness.
Let’s talk about Fundbureau and Waagenbau.
As he tried to get gigs playing the electric accordion, most places turned him away. “They had no trust in me. They were skeptical too, because I showed up with no recordings.”
Nobody believes you when you say you can really play techno on an accordion.
Then he met the Hamburg-based DJ and producer Convinzed, who worked at the time as the head artist booker for Fundbureau, one of Hamburg’s most cherished, longstanding club institutions, a former lost-and-found office tucked under the Sternbrücke.
“Within the shortest time, Convinzed got what I was doing. He understood it.” Nenad Akkordeon’s first gig at Fundbureau was in November of 2018.
“Back then, I wasn’t living entirely off music yet,” he says.
He drove blood supplies and food deliveries around the city between gigs. Thinking on Fundbureau, he muses: “This is where something really important happened for the accordion, and it’s sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.”
Fundbureau and Waagenbau both closed when the Sternbrücke, the rail bridge overhead, went into redevelopment, one more entry in the list of Hamburg spaces that closed recently because of new building initiatives.
Waagenbau was his “second home” from the end of 2019, again thanks to his friend Convinzed. He doesn’t say much more, just goes quiet for a bit, visibly still sad about this.
These clubs, and their original locations, were really precious and vital to the city, he says. They were located directly beneath the tracks of the Sternbrücke in Altona-Nord, so trains regularly rumbled over them, comparable to Berlin’s Golden Gate. They both offered raw, unpretentious atmospheres and were fixtures of Hamburg’s nightlife scene.
Fundbureau reopened in 2024. “But Waagenbau, my second home, it seems, will unfortunately not reopen at all. I don’t know the reasons.”
He mourns this loss: “Waagenbau was emotionally so important to me. It’s so sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.”
Tell me about your first album, Technoid.
It came out in November 2022. He won’t pick a favorite track from it. “They all mean a lot to me. Every piece is an idea that came out of my body, my head. It felt revolutionary.”
RockCity, the Hamburg musicians’ association, coaxed the album into existence.
“This isn’t music where you’re supposed to look normal,” he says. I ask him what he means by this. He says RockCity helped him build an image, which led to the signature red outfit.
Red is the color of freedom, and I’ve always been on the left.
What’s your proudest achievement?
He’s been profiled in SZENE, Hamburg’s trusted city and culture magazine, and other magazines. But in January 2026, Nenad Akkordeon became the official ambassador for the accordion in Schleswig-Holstein.
“Instrument of the Year” is a nationwide German initiative launched in Schleswig-Holstein in 2008. While a single instrument is selected nationwide each year, like the accordion for 2026, each participating state implements the campaign independently and features its own program and ambassador. Consequently, there is no single national ambassador; instead, there are multiple ambassadors serving concurrently across the different states.
He laughs: “I’m not supposed to tell you this story.” But he does: The strap of his accordion gets sweaty, worn from constant use. “It stinks sometimes. I have to wash it.”
At the official appointment ceremony for this new and prestigious title, in front of members of the CDU, he noticed that he hadn’t washed it recently. “I showed up in front of the CDU representatives with this stinking thing. I could smell it myself.”
But his ambassadorship makes our chat turn to politics. He’s very left, so what does he feel about Germany now? His voice dips:
Now, in the last ten years, this AfD. It’s so dark. It feels terrible that right-wing politics are getting stronger here. For me, as someone with a migration background, it’s terrible. I didn’t expect this.
Germany isn’t alone in this. “Unfortunately,” he says, “all of Europe, except maybe Spain, is shifting to the right.”
What is your music life like now?
This interview happened because, years after that first performance with my mom, I saw him perform again in 2025 at Sisyphos in Berlin, and that performance inspired me to ask him for a chat.
At that second show, I saw how his musical development, and especially his stage presence, had grown, and how his music had really come alive and reached a broader group of people.
Admittedly, the structure of the set hadn’t changed: classical accordion sounds alone at first, some Balkan brass, followed by classic techno tracks like Robert Miles’s “Children,” along with his own productions, all in a dense, packed club.
Seeing him perform made me think back on the first time I saw him, years ago, with my mom. In St. Georg, that room filled with middle-aged people was curious but still unsure what to make of him or his music.
Now, as a full-on accordion DJ and producer, the crowd’s doubt was gone. The crowd at Sisyphos was fascinated by him, and there was, among those I spoke to, a great sense of appreciation for the relationship between classical music and club sounds, a relationship that Nenad Akkordeon likes to play on.
“I’ve never experienced that anywhere else,” he says. “Two hundred people doing the same thing I’m doing. Feeling the moment of freedom. Right in front of me, and with me. ”
Follow Nenad Akkordeon on Instagram at @nenadakkordeon and listen to his music on Spotify and all streaming platforms.
Carla-Isabella Dunger is a writer at Hinterhaus, a subculture worker, and an aspiring music and culture journalist whose work centers on FLINTA* visibility in the scene. She is co-founder of the FLINTA* Roundtable in Hamburg, organizes events at Golden Pudel Club, and is active as a DJ. Follow her on Instagram.
Edits: Alexander Cheves
Images: Courtesy of Nenad Akkordeon
