Discoveries From globalFEST 2014

January 16, 2014

For this week's edition of All Songs Considered, NPR Music's Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR contributor and Afropop.org senior editor Banning Eyre, and Rob Weisberg of WNYC (who also hosts WFMU’s Transpacific Sound Paradise) join Bob Boilen to revisit some of the highlights and favorite discoveries from this year's globalFEST.

Excerpt:

BB- ….But speaking of costumes…

AT- Yeah, you can’t talk about costumes and globalFEST 2014 without talking about big, tall, furry Ukrainian hats, it’s just not gonna happen. There’s a band called DakhaBrakha who I think bleewwww a lot of the audience… yeah, they heads and tails were a favorite of a lot of people. And, uh.. Let’s take a listen to them.

(Music segment)

AT- So there are these crazy textures. It’s a Ukrainian band that bills itself as “Ukrainian folk-punk” and I think that’s totally right-on. It’s cello..

BB- …subversive, yet…

AT- …yeah, and subversive… and Pagan, and they’re hyper-theatrical, you know. It was sorta founded by members of an underground theater troupe, and there’s this real sense of theatricality on stage. You know, they’ve got these white gowns: the women dress in white dresses, and big tall black hats, and a lot of fog machines.. there’s a lot of fog machines involved. So there’s this epic feeling, and sometimes it can be very ethereal, and sometimes it can be very fierce, and this crazy instrumentation of vocals, and bass drum, and cello, and accordions, and the textures are amazing.

BB- I thought of Bjork when I saw this and heard this…

BE- Oh, sure.

BB- The extremes in the music. This was my favorite music of the evening, without a doubt – costumes too, maybe – but that’s what I loved: you’d have these long, dirge-y drones and then you’d have this real punky, rhythmic, all beating on drums and… you just didn’t know what to expect. I think musically this will be the thing I take away.

RW- Yeah, big build-ups, and everybody seems to respond to them… yeah. They just made a big impression.

AT- This is the second time I saw this band, DakhaBrakha, live. I saw them in Greece at WOMEX a year ago in the Fall, and now in NY, and both times they built from this very ethereal, misty sounding texture into this super-intense thing that I think took a lot of the audience by surprise, and it seems to me always takes the audience by surprise, at how they build that energy, and I think it really is punk in a lot of ways.