In recent years, a renaissance of Balkan Gypsy music has crept up throughout Western Europe thanks to a renewed interest in the unbridled, old school brass sounds of Macedonia's Fanfare Ciocãrlia and Romania's Taraf de Haidouks.

Closer to home, New York City is experiencing its own revival, but with a defiantly modern edge. Groups like the mighty Gogol Bordello, or the Hungry March Band and Luminescent Orchestrii inflect their music with passionate immigrant, punk 'tude. For the Brooklyn-based Balkan Beat Box, modernity comes the way of electronic programming and visual antics.

A typical live show features female singers dressed in traditional Eastern European garb singing high-pitched peasant chants from the balcony, beckoning to the horn players below who spray Middle Eastern melodies into the crowd to make way for the pig mask-wearing percussionists banging on marching drums. Fellini-esque video collage flickers on a screen behind the stage.

"We try to make a zone, where the audience feels like a part of the experience," says Ori Kaplan, saxophonist/co-leader of the BBB, which performs at GlobalFEST. "We want to erase the stage from the audience."

From the dance floor to the stage, BBB mutates from folksy, village wedding band to a wired, klezmer-rai-dancehall collective bent on twisting you with massive doses of infectious party music. Kaplan, 36, and co-founder drummer/programmer Yamir Muskat, 33, Israeli transplants via Tel Aviv, think of their culture clash as new mediterraneo.

"We are connected to where we grew up and who we are," says Kaplan, who formed BBB with Muskat nearly three years ago after working with New York's cabaret-pop group Firewater and Gogol Bordello. "In Israel, there were no geographical borders on the radio. They were constantly pumping Egyptian, music from Iraq, North Africa and other Arabic sounds."

As a child, Kaplan's Belarusian and Polish parents had him pick up the clarinet to learn Jewish klezmer; Muskat grew up with musician parents from Romania, learning about church music, classic jazz and African dance. Later on, the two discovered Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and Ornette Coleman as well as Greek and other Mediterranean rim music, especially from Algeria. Muskat played drums for Tel Aviv rock group Izabo in his teens.

Both moved to New York more than a dozen years ago to expand their music opportunities. The two met in Firewater, later worked with Gogol Bordello, which inspired the J.U.F. (Jewish Ukrainian Friendship) DJ project and more collaborations. The CD "Gogol Bordello vs. Tamir Muskat," in the same vein as the excellent Six Degrees compilation "Electric Gypsyland," came out in 2004.

"In that sense our music is authentically Israeli," says Kaplan. "Our music is connected to the Ottoman Empire, a combination of our immigrant influence in New York, fused together with everything, including underground and hip-hop beats."

Not surprising, the BBB members and its guest performers represent their musical roots and influences. The group's 2005 self-titled debut, on JDub Records, features American, Bulgarian, Iranian, Moroccan, Palestinian and Spanish players. "It's important for us to show that we can have this sort of unity in our group," Kaplan says.

It also says something about their worldview. Though mostly festive, some BBB songs get aggressive, with social commentary, sung in broken English, that calls for peace in the Middle East ("Trance of resistance, we're making Bush belly-dancing with Afghanistans").