Bring the Dance and Leave the Guns: an Interview with Balkan Beat Box
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"It was actually a really natural process to go into the studio and say "let's make a hip hop, punk, hardcore, gypsy song with like a really hard edge folk singer from Bulgaria or Morocco." It sounds really complicated, but for us, it's just like one plus one."
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Interview by Ryan Daniels "Bring the dance and leave the guns," rhymes Balkan Beat Box in the track La Bush Resistance, "we're making Bush belly dance with Afghanistans." In their own words, BBB is "a natural reaction of musicians who wanted to erase political boundaries ('as our ears don't have them, why should we?')" Balkan Beat Box's two Israeli-born and Brooklyn-based founders Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan routinely collaborate with Palestinians (at one point having Israeli and Palestinian rappers side by side on stage in Jerusalem), Syrians, Bulgarians, and Moroccans, among others, in a constantly evolving group of musicians and artists around the world. So, how's everything been? Really good… Yeah, just getting back from the tour and taking a break in Tel Aviv for awhile. You just played a few festivals around Europe, right? Yeah, we toured in France and in Sweden and in England and in Spain and Germany and Serbia and what else, the Czech Republic, I guess all over the place. How did you go over in the Czech Republic? Oh, wow man.. It was one of the best shows on the tour. In Ostrava there were 10,000 people at the show, it was massive and they were really into it. We drove from Novi Sad in Serbia, so we were in a bus for 14 hours. It basically dropped us onto the stage of this amazing 10,000 person crowd. We had a crazy show there. Hahha. That sounds like a nice thing to wake up to after that kind of drive! Yeah, it’s quite a radical shift – a couple of sips of vodka and you’re there.
It’s hard to say. It can be from LA to New York to Israel to Sweden to France. I mean so many times we've been in front of a few thousand people who are going completely ape shit dancing and going wild.
You know, it really can be anywhere, we can never tell, it just grabs everybody. It depends on maybe the mood in the room or how much alcohol we consumed and [how much] everybody else did. It really takes us by surprise, it can be like Lotus Festival in Indiana, some of the wildest shows, or it can be Spain or it can be Stockholm. |
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The Man at the Bus Stop: I had flown, bussed, ferried and hitch-hiked nearly 7,500 miles from my home in San Francisco testking 70-620 to a tiny Norwegian town near the Arctic Circle named Korsnes. I was there to write about testking 642-901 killer whales for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Specifically, the piece was about research on how the creatures engage in collective feeding when they feast on herring in local fjords. I had planned my visit carefully, working with one of the researchers to determine what one-week time frame would yield the highest probability for whales. We considered tides. We considered daylight (which only lasts for six hours during that time of year). We even factored in reports from local fishermen, since testking cissp the whales usually follow the fish. But the whales, those stubborn little buggers, never showed.
I just picked up 'Nu Med' and boy, does that disc swing hard. Balkan Beat Box reminds me of the music from the Yugoslav film 'Underground', which is this 90 minute intoxicating frenetic romp. Now, how about an interview with Gogol Bordello?
excellent interview - i'm stoked to hear the music, but it's late and i'm couch-surfing and can't wake my host. must wait til morning. hope i remember.