Track Listing

1. Keep 'Em Straight (Intro)
2. Hermetico
3. Habibi Min Zaman
4. Bbbeat
5. Digital Monkey
6. Balcasio
7. Pachima
8. Quand Est-Ce Qu'on Arrive?
9. Mexico City
10. Delancey
11. Joro Boro
12. Gypsy Queens
13. $20 for Boban
14. Baharim (Outro)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15934 in Music
• Released on: 2007-05-21
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import

Songlines, (Jonathan Walton), June 2007
(4 stars) Dance floor pumping grooves with tasty Balkan riffs and
motifs at the core.

Album Description
With their roots from all around the Mediterranean rim, Balkan Beat Box transcends categories by creating a new breed of 21st century music, deeply rooted in their folk upbringing yet forward-thinking, which appeals to audiences across geographical and stylistic borders. Their new album blends elements of ragga and hip hop with Balkanoid horns, Arab and Bulgarian guest singers, Greek guitars and more. Balkan Beat Box are an awesome live band. They've been making crowds go wild at major festivals across the world and will be appearing at the Wychwood, Larmertree and Womad Festivals in the UK this year.

The core of Balkan Beat Box is its two founders: saxophone player Ori Kaplan and drummer/programmer/producer Tamir Muskat. After having been active for over a decade in some of NYC's premier underground bands (including Gogol Bordello, Firewater, Big Lazy, Shotnez), they joined forces with charismatic MC Tomer Yosef and brought together their combined experiences and ideas to create the powerhouse called Balkan Beat Box.

'Nu Med' features the band's hyperactive vocalist/MC Tomer Yosef, as well as a host of distinguished guests: Syrian singer Dunia, Moroccan singer Gilber Gilmore, Macedonian clarinet master Ismail Lumanovski, Bulgarian vocalist Dessislava Stefanova and Mikey Nikolic, Lance Muncan and Vinny Sau, three outstanding young Serbian Gypsy musicians born and based in Queens, NYC.

Personnel: Ori Kaplan - (saxophones), Tamir Muskat - (drums, programmer) Tomer Yosef - (vocals), Dunia - (vocals), Gilber Gilmore - (vocals), Ismail Lumanovski - (clarinet), Dessislava Stefanova - (vocals), Uri Kinrot - (guitar), Itamar Ziegler - (bass), and many others

Customer Reviews

Thrilling!
This album tickles every one of my musical tastebuds...
Having found it by 'surfing' around Amazon and listening to soundbytes from all and sundry I am delighted.

Humourous, skilled, original and inspiring.

Bright, breezy, and Balkan.
Want to know why Balkan music is sweeping the world's dancefloors at the moment?
Just have a blast of Nu-Med and all will be revealed. BB seem to be following in the great seventies Two Tone tradition of united races...Israelis, Moroccans, Bulgarians, arabs, jews all kinds of influences clashing gloriously together in a massive rocking party: make music, have a ball and break down divides.

There is a refreshing lack of pretension to this sound, an invigorating blend of virtuoso musicianship, bizarre time signatures, an anarchic collision of east/west/old/new instrumentation, and above all, driving grooves. I personally love the mix of old and new. Snake charmer's pipes over beatbox rhythms, accordian, oompah tuba, surf guitar, chunky b-lines, Hip hop sensibilities. A genre-defying collision of mediterranean and eastern european styles in grand sweeping arrangements. The overall effect is hypnotic and driving, forcing the feet to move, the hands to gyrate above the head, and a large toothy grin to spread across the face.

Resistance is futile, get down and get dancin'... huzzah!

New med
Just look at the camels parachuting into a striped desert. Who wouldn't want to listen to what's inside?

Well, hopefully lots of people will. East European fusion music is moderately hot right now, with bands like Beirut and Gogol Bordello on the rise. But one of the best ones is Balkan Beat Box, whose second album "Nu Med" further polishes their ethnic hip-hop/rock sound -- it's just a thoroughly colourful, flavourful album.

It opens with a deliciously funky "Keep it Straight," which sounds like an Arabian market being invaded by hip-hop gypsy brass bands. It's followed by the deliciously colourful rap song "Hermetico," riddled with brass blats, handclaps, horses, and a voice telling us, "We're comin' straight through your ears, no complications... here we go, you better listen..."

They follow it with the exotic "Habibi Min Zaman," which sounds like a James Bond soundtrack in the Middle-East, and lead in to a bunch of even better songs: bootyshaking marches, sinuous rap, gypsy music wrapped in electrodance, folksy horn-rock, funky Balkan dance tunes, and colourful folk pop filled with yipping, yowling vocals.

If anything, "Nu Med" is even better than Balkan Beat Box's debut -- it's more polished and melodious, and more relaxed now that they have their sound down. But they don't change much musically, with the core of the music remaining the same: Middle-Eastern and East-European folk music, interwoven with modern dance, rock and hip-hop.

Musically it's a big hodgepodge -- you can hear some steely guitar buried under all the other sounds, which is the most normal part of it. Then you have nimble horns forming sinuous melodies and funky edges, solid drums, some colourful electronica, some accordion and some murmuring violins in "Mexico City," which is the one dud in the album. It's too sedate and mellow for the raucous overall sound.

But they also spice it up with samples and odd sounds -- babies laughing, horses neighing, a man calling out in another language. And in some songs, we get some very heavily accented rapping, usually pretty nonsensical: "I'm the digital monkey/supply the freakin' season with the rhythm that's funky/I come from Belize/but don't belong to no country..."

"Nu Med" takes what Balkan Beat Box had to begin with, and polishes it to gem status. Despite that one dud song, it's a wild, colourful festival ride, full of gypsy music and dance flavour.