Balkan Beat Box Brings The Funk To Brooklyn

nik.mercer — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:19:34 -0800

Listen—you’re probably right to have an aversion to music described as “fusion.” It’s like calling a meal “ingredients.” The obvious questions should be: What is being fused? How? And more importantly: is it any good? Last Thursday night at Brooklyn’s Masonic Temple—a venue about the size of Irving Plaza—the Balkan Beat Box fused, blended and mashed up in the best sense of those words. The sexual rhythms of funk-tinged hip-hip, dance, dub and techno took the audience on a genre-defying passage through Jewish, Arabic and Eastern European languages, melodies and tempos.