NEMANJA

nemanja is the project of Luka Šipetić, an author and musician active in the bands pastele, Para Lele and NLV, who recorded and released the albums Tarot Funk (2019) and Cosmic Disco (2020). The debut album, Tarot Funk, is an instrumental album that Šipetić himself recorded, produced and mixed in a house near Pula, in January 2019. The album is a tribute to the sound of Thai funk, Afro-funk, Anatolian (Turkish) rock of the 70s and Cambodian psycho rock of the 60s. The specificity of the album is that the songs were written for specially selected tarot cards, the symbolism of which, together with the music, forms a narrative whole that the listener must discover.

The album has so far been presented to the public on radio shows dedicated to world and psychedelic music in the USA, Canada, Turkey, Cyprus, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Australia, Great Britain and Spain and is included in Bandcamp Weekly, a list promoting new musical hopefuls on Bandcamp’s homepage. Actively playing since June 2019, nemanja quickly made it to respected summer festivals in Croatia, such as Indirekt, Tam-Tam and Velvet Festival, and they also performed side by side with bands such as Algires and Kikagaku Moyo. During the promotion of the album, they sold out the clubs KSET and Medika in Zagreb, and also played in Ljubljana, Belgrade, Novi Sad and throughout the region.

The second album, Cosmic Disco, was written, recorded and produced by Šipetić as a musical response to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Two months after its release, the songs from the Cosmic Disco album were on prominent world music charts in France and Germany, and were also published in the October edition of the best magazine dedicated to world music – British Songslines.