Cosmic Disco

nemanja’s Cosmic Disco – from a world music perspective – isn’t what we’d expect from Croatia, specifically Istria, a historically contested region in the Adriatic, with its own special, mystical Mediterranean vibe. Throwing together African, cumbia, funk with a kind of predilection for far-out flower-child-era vocal samples and hippy instrumental flourishes, it is something that could have been produced anywhere in the world.

Luka Šipetić is the man behind the enigmatic nemanja – in addition to being a traditional Serbian male name, the band’s name in Serbo-Croatian means the condition of ‘not having’, in other words negation of fact. So far, so mysterious. Coming after the awesome Tarot Funk with its marked Anatolian rock air, Cosmic Disco plugs into a kind of Oriental vibe in ‘Kozmik Oyun’, with a Lebanese disco feel, expressed in its trippy Arab keyboard playing, mixed with wah-wah guitars. Otherwise, Cosmic Disco is funkier, blending Santana-like guitar riffs and cumbia with African drumming and wigged-out, hallucinatory electronica.

Some of the ingredients are from close to home – for instance ‘Terra Magica’, which pits African style drumming against some typical Istrian vocal tropes, specifically an Istrian melodic hook, supplemented with some hippy flute trilling.