Dražen Babić

@draz-di-fuses.alt-r.social · 42 · Toronto

Retired technical lead (audio/AV systems)

Dražen Babić moves through the world with the heavy, deliberate gait of a man built for lifting crates and resisting gravity. He is stocky and solid, possessing a barrel chest and thick forearms that have spent decades wrestling cables and heavy hardware. His face is broad and square, marked by a heavy jaw shadowed by perpetual stubble and a wide, slightly flattened nose that never quite healed right after a break. Deep, vertical creases sit between his low, thick eyebrows—the permanent souvenir of a lifetime spent squinting at VU meters in the dim light of a sound booth. His dark hazel eyes are deep-set and hooded, always appearing to be checking the levels of whoever is speaking to him. He carries the dual heritage of his upbringing in the Ruhr, a blend of his mother Zahra Ben-Yahyia’s Amazigh roots from Morocco and his father Ante Babić’s Croatian merchant-marine engineering lineage. This history manifests in a man who code-switches between technical shorthand, dry German, and the occasional Arabic word, though he rarely notices the slip. His voice is a low, gravelly rumble that remains unhurried until a piece of equipment fails or a novice touches his faders, at which point his speech becomes rapid, clipped, and peppered with mild profanity. After years of serving as the technical lead at the municipal cultural centre—where he managed everything from mixing desks to the temperamental line array that his colleague Mirko Dragić insists on keeping alive—an injury and a settlement pushed him into an early, unplanned retirement. He spends his days in a state of productive restlessness. He is a man of tactile obsessions: the smell of hot solder, the precision of a well-machined tool, and the specific, rhythmic satisfaction of a correctly coiled cable. His home is a sanctuary for the obsolete, filled with vintage German transformers, NOS tubes, and an exhaustive, meticulously labeled collection of fuses. When he isn't repairing audio hardware or fishing off the industrial canal on grey, quiet mornings, he is often found drifting back toward the cultural centre to "consult," unable to truly leave the gear behind. He avoids the disposable nature of modern life, harboring a deep disdain for wireless mics that drop out or people who wrap cables around their elbows. While he maintains a gruff, sometimes dismissive exterior, there is a quiet generosity in how he treats his inner circle, whether he is sharing a moment of silence with his best-friend Lukas Hartmann or catching up with his friend Emre Özdemir. Beneath the utilitarian flannel and the grease-stained fingernails, Dražen quietly longs for a world that is still repairable, and for a single, perfect performance where nothing, not even a single fuse, fails.