Track Listing

1. Cha Cha
2. Bulgarian Chicks
3. Adir Adirim
4. 9/4 The Ladies
5. Shushan
6. Ya Man
7. Gross
8. Sunday Arak
9. Hassan's Mimuna
10. Meboli
11. La Bush Resistance
12. The Balkan Beat Box first show (Bonus video directed and filmed by Alma Harel)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31360 in Music
• Released on: 2005-11-14
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Balkan Beat Box are an intoxicating combination of performance, World-infused electronic music with live musicians from Israel, Morocco, and even Iran. DJ's collide with Flamenco dancers, Belly dancers, and a VJ, mixing the ecstatic sounds and sights of the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Have a look at their 11-minute video which is included on this CD: The Balkan Beat Box first show.

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!

About the Artist
Balkan Beat Box was formed in 2003 and is spearheaded by Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat. Tamir and Ori have been active for a decade in NYC's premier underground bands like Firewater, Gogol Bordello, Big Lazy, Shot'nez and DJing around the world and touring with the Balkan Beat Box extravaganza. Tamir Muskat grew up with Romanian and African music in the house. Ori Kaplan grew up playing Klezmer clarinet in Jaffa. Both were playing in the NY scene with various downtown bands for more then a decade. Ori studied with Yuri Yunakov - the king of Bulgarian gypsy saxophone and played and toured with Gogol Bordello, Firewater, Shot'nez extensively around the globe. Tamir produced some of Gogol Bordello's, Firewater, JUF, and Big Lazy most memorable music and toured the world extensively. Balkan Beat Box is a natural progression of their diaspora experience.

Customer Reviews

Loved it
I originally bought the Radio 3 2007 World Music Awards and it contained the song 'Cha Cha' by the Balkan Beat Box. I liked the track so much I ordered the album and I was definitely not disappointed. Several of my friends have listened and loved it also - although my 22 year old niece thought it was wierd.

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).

Dance with a Difference
Sultry and hypnotic horns blend with an almost surf-style guitar mixing Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Israeli and Eastern European influences with a heavy dance beat; and it works really well! Balkan Beat Box sucessfully manage to mix everything together as if it was always meant to be that way.

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.

Dance (boom cha!)
Not every album kicks off with a rooster crowing. But then, not every band is brave enough for some quirky folk/hip-hop as their main sound.

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.