Vocal-instrumental ensemble, (Srb. “VIS”) Limunada is a band that performs contemporary music inspired by the international popular culture of the fifties and the sixties.
In their live performances, VIS Limunada revives the spirit of this exciting period, through the specific prism of Yugoslav popular culture. VIS Limunada performs contemporary interpretations of schlager, festival compositions, early rock and beat hits, as well as original songs. At concerts this ensemble evokes the atmosphere of European festivals and rivieras depicted in films like Felini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Ljubav i moda (1961) by Yugoslav director Ljubomir Radičević.
VIS Limunada is a six-piece ensemble whose music arrangements are built upon a rich correspondence between two female and two male vocalists, a powerful guitar sound, enriched with organs, piano and lively rhythm from varying percussion instruments. In addition to this basic concept, there are leads on various other instruments like Hawaiian guitar (lap-steel), baritone guitar, ukulele, as well as string and brass elements. In a clash of melodramatic schlager and exciting rock and beat music in rich vocal-instrumental arrangements, VIS Limunada brings modern, elegant and expressive pop music. On their repertoire there are original songs as well as original adaptations and new interpretations of compositions in a variety of genres and languages (Serbo-Croatian, Italian, English, Spanish, and German, to name a few).
The artistic direction and visual identity of VIS Limunada are inspired by a time when “ensembles” and “orchestras” ruled the scene and “bands” were just emerging, when musicians and audience dressed in elegant dresses and suits and “numbers” were performed instead of “songs”, and when festivals and rivieras across Europe and the world echoed with the strong but gentle sounds of emerging, international pop music. Across the globe a new popular culture was being created, infused by new technological breakthroughs: technicolor film, transcontinental radio and TV broadcasting, supersonic flights and space programs. It was distinguished by a sound that brought together the melancholic tenderness of parlor music, flavored with the elegant decadence of bohemian parties. This particular moment at the end of fifties and the beginning of sixties was characterized by miraculous union of refinement and recklessness, merit and banality, and a perhaps naïve, but respectful, belief in a bright future.
This energy, which does not lose its value even in the light of complex contradictions that followed, is transferred and evolved by VIS Limunada, not with nostalgia but with zeal, as its own commentary on the challenges of the present days, as well as its contribution to current popular culture.