“...a magnificent mash-up melding music from every conceivable corner of the globe and its history.” (Chicago Sun-Times)
"Take the rooster crow opening this CD as a warning, a wake-up call that your feet are going to want to dance and your head bob maniacally side to side. Balkan Beat Box does for Balkan music what fellow New Yorkers Yerba Buena done with Latin roots, twisting the tradition to their own nefarious ends. BBB blends Balkan horns and vocals, Middle Eastern rhythms, turntables, big fat power chords, and other musical flotsam into an exotic, compelling Balkan rave. Don't even try to resist." (Spin the Globe--World Music Magazine)
When strife forces cultures to stand on opposite sides of a line, music can always find harmony. Based out of New York, the 10 musicians of Balkan Beat Box have tossed political frictions in the trash, embraced the common language of their pan-Mediterranean and Balkan backgrounds, and brought it into the limitless world of global electronica. Led by iconic Israeli klezmer masters Ori Kaplan (formerly of Gogol Bordello), and Tamir Muskat, the BBB sound is a mesmerizing miasma of everything from Turkish melodies to gypsy-techno rhythms, psychedelic Western guitars to Balkan horns. More to the point, it's a liberating frenzy of sound: haunting ululations soaring over relentless and hypnotic beats, driven to ecstasy by the primal sound of what the band calls the Nu-Med sound.
CITY PAGES A-LIST PICK: Israeli-born New Yorkers Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat have a lot up their sleeves—and under their hats and in their pockets and stuffed under the sofa. And whatever's down their pants makes them indefatigable danceaholics at home on floors from Kazakstan to the South Bronx. In fact, as the principals leading the wildly eclectic international collective Balkan Beat Box, Kaplan and Muskat would seem to have squirreled away hundreds of world-music artifacts, all to be summoned by the crazy rhythms of contemporary beats and electronica. Actually, BBB primarily stick to Mediterranean realms, if that can be stretched to include the Eastern European origins of klezmer, the smart-ass downtown scene of Lower Manhattan, the Southern California home of surf guitar, and toasting's Jamaican roots. Pretty much anything is fair game, as long as it's exotic, cutting-edge, and audacious, as the BBB boys push politics aside for an endless party that easily transports listeners from Tel Aviv to Istanbul, Mexico City, Rio, and Sofia within just a few bars. (Rick Mason)
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