Emir & Frozen Camels

Emir & Frozen Camels, often shortened to EFC, is a Bosnian rock band founded in 1998 in Fort Myers, Florida, by the singer, guitarist and songwriter Emir Bukovica, who also writes most of its songs. Bukovica was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and began his career in Sarajevo, and the band has lived in two worlds ever since, with an American and a Balkan line-up.

He started playing the guitar at eleven, encouraged by his older brother, also a guitarist, and formed his first rock band, Metro, in the former Yugoslavia. He wrote songs for groups of the Sarajevo pop-rock scene and worked on an album by the girl group Cacadou Look. At the end of 1993 he moved to the United States, finished his studies there and became close friends with the American blues musician Danny Shepard, who pushed him to record his own songs.

The first Emir & Frozen Camels brought together Bukovica, Shepard, the drummer Darrell Nutt and Cliff Williams, the bass player of AC/DC. They recorded the debut album San in 1999 at SoundCheck Studios in Fort Myers, and it came out in 2000. After a deal with Dallas Records the band moved its base to the former Yugoslavia, where Bukovica gathered local musicians next to the American ones. At the end of 2002 the American line-up, Williams included, played a short European tour, the Frozen Camels Project Tour: the first time Williams had toured with a band other than AC/DC.

The second album, Znam (2003), was picked by Croatian music critics among the ten best albums of the year. It holds "Uhljup – Glamour papak" with Elvis J. Kurtović, El Bahattee and Rambo Amadeus, "Ti i ja (Sevdah blues)", a cover of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" and "Sarajevo, New York, Roma", also remixed by Adi Lukovac & Ornamenti. The collaboration with Williams won the band the Davorin award for best international collaboration in 2002, and "Sarajevo, New York, Roma" won the Davorin for best urban and rock song in 2004.

Winning MTV's Catch the Frequency contest took EFC to the FM4 Frequency festival in Salzburg, on a bill with Nine Inch Nails, Tool and Snow Patrol. The third album, No Pasaran, came out in May 2009 and won the Indexi award for the best rock and roll album of 2010. The band played the main stage of the Exit festival, was the special guest at a Lenny Kravitz concert at his own request, played to more than 100,000 people at the Belgrade Beer Fest in 2009 and saw in 2012 on the main square of Sarajevo before some 50,000.

A Best of album followed on 21 May 2013. That year Emir & Frozen Camels represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the first Türkvizyon Song Contest in Eskişehir with "Ters Bosanka", sung with Mirza Šoljanin, and finished sixth in the final. Their best-known songs also include "Ne pitaj me", "Jedina", "Nacrtaj mi ljubav" with Djule of Van Gogh, "Flaster", "Nisam sam", "Volim te" and "Rekla je volim te". The current line-up is Bukovica with Sanin Imamović and Bojan Nikolić on guitars, Jasmin Smajić on bass and Benjamin Moranjkić on drums.