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Product Description
Album Description
Balkan Beat Box views music with fresh eyes: as a continuing cultural dialogue. It can take the form of a clash of cultures, and sometimes it is diasporic in nature. At other times it is Israeli with all the music that lives there - Arabic, Sephardic, Hassidic - a true melting pot with never-ending sources of inspiration. Balkan Beat Box performs regularly in Israel, where it receives rave reviews and a tremendous audience reaction. This summer BBB presented their music in some of the biggest Festivals in Europe and North America and received a wild reaction and standing ovations.
Balkan Beat Box is best explained as a performance-meets-dance party that generates ecstatic energy by blending electronic music with hard-edged folk music from North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Their festive evenings also feature colourful costumes and bedecked performers dancing and performing throughout the party. The musical crew which is led by Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat also includes MC, vocalist and percussionist Tomer Yosef, Uri Kinrot on guitar, Itamar Ziegler on bass and special guests the Bulgarian Chicks, Hassan Ben Jaffar, Victoria Hanna, belly dancers, flamenco dancers and more!
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Customer Reviews
Much like their sister band Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box creates a funky mishmash of cultural influences. But their music ends up sounding like a gypsy electronica musician who just got back from a Middle-Eastern tour. Yup, it's really as wild as it sounds.
It kicks off with the most infectious song on the album, "Cha Cha," which commands you "dance!" before the beat kicks in -- deliciously funky and danceable. It's followed by the glorious "Bulgarian Chicks," which has Vlada Tomova & Kristin Espeland singing merrily over trumpets and dancey beats.
Then they take a detour out of folkland, with dark hip-hop, Middle Eastern wails, sultry European saxophones, and delightfully raucous blasts of Eastern-European rock'n'roll, with chants interspersing blasts of grimy guitar. It ends on a surprisingly low-key note, with the hypnotic beats of "La Bush Resistance," with Tomer Yosef and Amir Shahasar chanting over it all.
If you had to describe Balkan Beat Box, then it would probably be Middle-Eastern/Jewish/gypsy beatbox/rock/electrofolk. If there's a name for fusion music like that, I'd love to hear of it, because it would probably be as entertainingly colourful as the music itself.
Balkan Beat Box's strongest point is its instrumentation -- we've got the usual instruments, but they're almost smothered in a thick layer of woodwinds, trombones, trumpets, sax and electronic programming here and there. And the musical styles are flexible -- we've got the jagged hip-hop right next to slithering Mid-East beats and bouncy Eastern European stuff.
The vocals per se aren't really provided by the official band, but by a long list of vocalists who sort of chip in on one song each. This can be a little confusing at times, especially since none of them really sound like each other, but it does add to the raucously unexpected sound of the album.
If anybody is completely sick of prepackaged, flavourless pop music, then they should check out Balkan Beat Box. Colourful, energetic and thoroughly entertaining.
The style is adequately described in the other reviews so I won't repeat. I have played it several times and enjoy it more each time. (BTW, The Radio 3 WMA album is also a brilliant album).
The Bulgarian Chicks are terrific and Victoria Hanna's vocals on Adir Adirim are fantastic and 9/4 for the Ladies is a brilliant dance track. This is an album you'll listen to over and over again. And their second album, Nu Med, is even better.
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