Dubioza Kolektiv was created in 2003 by some musicians coming from different bands: Adisa Zvekic, Adis Zvekic, Almir Hasanbegovic and Emir Alic were in the Gluho doba against Def Age, from Zenica (BiH) ; Brano Jakubovic and Vedran Mujagic had previously set up Ornamenti (Sarajevo). Then, the guitar player Armin Busatlic (ex - SCH, Beastly Stroke) joined the Kolektiv.
Dubioza recorded its first auto produced album for Gramofon Rec in April, 2004. After 7 months, they released their second album: EP Open Wide. The third one, Dubnamite, which hosts people like Defence (Tuzla, BiH) and Niköll (Nicolas Cante - France), came out for Gramofon in June, 2006.
Duboiza was invited to the “fête de L'Huma” on last September, 15th and we seized the opportunity to ask them for an interview...

Can you introduce youselves briefly ?

Dubioza is a real Bosnian-Herzegovinian band (4 are from Zenica, 3 from Sarajevo and the last one who joined the band, the drummer, is from Mostar) ; most of us are Muslims but some are from mixed marriages.
Dubioza started more as our expression of meet to react to the political situation in BiH than like a real musical project. Its was made from very intentional searches, socially engaged, and the music aspect of the band was more on second plan. The project started in Sarajevo, talking about the situation there, drinking coffee. We all have been in music for more than 10 year. In mid 2003, we just met up to put together all we have learnt. We all have so different influences, from Hip Hop to Hardcore. We just started practising together and we released our 1st album, which was kind of homemade, without a proper studio production. Since then we have been playing more than 80 gigs, mostly big festivals abroad. This summer we played almost every week-end, something between 30 & 40 concerts in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Slovenia, Hungary (sziget festival 2003, 2004 on the Afro Reggae stage),…
Actually 8 is the maximum up limit cause 8 can fit in a van, 5 or 8 is the same.
Music is like a way to survive for the spirit and to spread the word about Bosnia.

Your 1st date in France was “La Fête de l’Humanité” : does it have any special meaning for you ? What will stay your favorite moment during this festival ? What are your feelings about it ?

The first gig somewhere is always important and the context for this one was also special. It is good to see the activist part of the social life of a country, to see how the people are connected, work together to organize such huge event. It’s a beautiful way to get the society very closed to their opinions, choices. Whereas in our country we don’t have such events ; just a month before an election, they put posters all over the country, they spend all the budget just on promoting the election.
Musically it is always very exciting to play for the first time somewhere, especially in big cities. We hope we will come back next year in this festival.

How hard is it to be recognized for a young Bosnian band ?

No one recognize us, we have to do it all by ourselves.
Bosnia is a small country, there is no real music scene, not too many bands are working. And we have many other difficulties. As most of the major media ignore existence of bands talking about politics, they just want stupid folk bands talking about nothing on TV because the ruling class still doesn’t want to hear and talk about problems. So it is very hard to make your way to the media. For the last year and a half we have had more appearances on TV in political talk shows than in music ones. It is the only way to get to the media because the music industry is undeveloped. There is no place for us.
To play abroad is another problem. Actually, being a Bosnian is a problem. We need to get a visa, we spend a lot of money for the transport since there is no cheap company flying here. You have to spend more than two weeks working on visas and most of promoters don’t want to spend time on it. Some embassies are supporting and give visa for free, like the French Institute, the Austrian embassy, but some like the Dutch, the Italians are really strict and you have to pay in any case… The visa is only from country to country. And even France gives you like a 5 days visa so it means you go and come back, you can not spend some time there to make contacts.

Any special message to the young people in your concert ?

When we play in a country like Slovakia we know what to tell them, because they almost lived the same. The Separation between Slovakia and Czech republic was quite the same as in Yugoslavia . But the difference is that it didn't happened on such badly way than in Bosnia . That's why we are telling them that they are lucky, they didn't lived a war.
And in other countries we try to spread the good word that Bosnia is not the place of terrorism as they present it and that because this very small amount of people imported during the war, we suffer of such bad image whereas religion has nothing to do with terrorism. They use it as a cover. And I am more afraid of the evil empire of the United States than of all those terrorists, because they are terrorists.

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