Interview by Ryan Daniels
Photos by Miao Wang, Itamar Ziegler

"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.

Matador had the opportunity to catch a few late night moments with a very tired and very gracious Ori Kaplan, on break from tour in Tel Aviv.

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.

 
Where would you say you’ve had your best response from an audience?

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.

 
Hahahaha….

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  Read More...