Ljubojna

Ljubojna, also written Luboyna, is a Macedonian ethno and world music band from Skopje. It was founded there in 2001 by the singer Vera Miloševska and the bassist and composer Oliver Josifovski, and its name joins the Macedonian words for love and war, ljubov and bojna. The band takes traditional Macedonian songs, many of them from Aegean Macedonia and from the chalgia music of Bitola, and plays them with brass, jazz, funk, soul and electronic touches.

Josifovski was born in 1973 in Bair mala, a neighbourhood of Bitola, into a family of percussionists, and he had been the double bassist and composer in the first line-up of Foltin. He met Miloševska while studying at the conservatory in Sofia; she had sung in children's and women's choirs and with the orchestra of the gajda player Pece Atanasovski. The band publishes its own records on its label Bajro Zakon Corporation.

The debut album, Parite se otepuvačka, came out in 2005. It was followed by the live and unplugged Macedonia Fresh in 2008, an album in 2009 that set poems by Petre M. Andreevski to music, and Ljubojna in Life, a concert recorded at the Universal Hall in Skopje and issued with Life magazine in 2011. That year the band added a brass section and began to appear as Ljubojna Brass Fantasy. The album Brass Fantasy (2012) gathers traditional love songs from Aegean Macedonia arranged for a large brass orchestra, with Josifovski conducting from a snare drum instead of playing bass.

Sherbet Luboyna (2015) returned to chalgia songs from the Bitola area. Radio Luboyna (2017), made for the band's fifteenth anniversary and called its ninth album by the Serbian weekly Vreme, brought together some thirty musicians, among them the keyboardist Vasil Hadžimanov, the guitarist Vlatko Stefanovski, the trumpeter Džambo Aguševi of the Džambo Aguševi Orchestra and the Turkish clarinettist Hüsnü Şenlendirici. Its songs include "Kratovo via Brazil", "Galičnik via New York", "Ohrid via Dolmabahçe", "Mome odi za voda" and "Ogreala mesečina".

In March 2017 Ljubojna presented the album at its first concert in Belgrade, in the Dom sindikata hall, with Stefanovski, Hadžimanov and Džambo as guests; with Stefanovski the band played a new version of the Leb i Sol hit "Skopje". The band has also written for theatre, ballet and film. Its official videos include "Rakija" (2016) and "Izlegu da se rašeta" with the clarinettist Ismail Lumanovski, and it has played concerts with the Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra and the singer Dzijan Emin, among them "Sevdo le".