The guy that worked the hotel reception desk looked at me, as if to make sure he had heard correctly. “Tallava? You want tallava?” he said, like I wanted a dose of the clap. “Are you sure you really want to hear this shit? I know of a place on the edge of town. But I’m warning you, it is a ...
The new Balkan sound departs from the clean, straight, beat-laden Balkan club tracks of yore, insofar as the new stuff is looser, fuzzier, deeper, more distorted, less distinct - subtler even, trafficking less in Balkan clichés. “Ethno psychedelia”, you could call it. Balkan Taksim group members Sașa-Liviu Stoianovici and Alin Zăbrăuțeanu have known each other for more than a decade, ...
FIVE-MAN LA CARAVANE PASSE, led by multi-instrumentalist, multi-linguist Toma Feterman, returns with Nomadic Spirit, their sixth album, a dizzily euphoric, Babylonian mix of Balkan Gypsy, flamenco, hip-hop, gnawa and Oriental excursions. As with the previous albums, a burlesque mood pervades these eleven very different songs. Toma Feterman sings in Parigot French with a liberal dose of English and some Spanish and Serbo-Croatian ...
Like rats jumping a sinking ship, World Beat DJs have ditched the Balkans in favor of sounds further afield — mainly from Turkey or the Middle East. Having said this, there still seem to be places where the Balkans reverberate musically: Tokyo, Mexico City — and the San Francisco Bay Area — home to Will Magid and Balkan Bump, an ...
In Vladičin Han, the South Serbian town, where Marko Marković hails from, nearly everyone plays brass . “Growing up I didn’t have a choice,” says Marko. “The trumpet chose me.” Marko Marković (30) is the son of Balkan brass legend Boban Marković, five times winner of “Best Trumpeter” award at Guča, Serbia’s annual summer-time brass music blow-out. Almost before he ...