To listen to audio on Rock Paper Scissors you'll need to Get the Flash Player

Sample Track 1:
"Šiško’s Blues" from Teknochek Collision
Sample Track 2:
"¡Ruchenitsa!" from Teknochek Collision
Buy Recording:
Teknochek Collision
Layer 2
Whipping Listeners Into a Balkan State

Click Here to go back.
The New York Sun, Whipping Listeners Into a Balkan State >>

-by Steve Dollar

Slavic Soul Party has a gig that's hard to beat. The raucous brass band, which features nine members — give or take a belly dancer — holds forth every Tuesday night at Barbès, a compact bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that has cultivated a lively scene around the group's marathon performances.

The venue's intimate back room gets cozier than a phone booth when the rumpus starts. Fans, most of them female, come to dance, and those reluctant to join the fray will likely find themselves exiled to a barstool.

"It's terrifying, exhausting, and way more aggressive than a lot of the punk music I've seen," Sufjan Stevens, the Brooklyn singer-songwriter who caught the show one night, told Rolling Stone. It's a quote that Slavic Soul Party's leader, Matt Moran, loves to cite.

"What could be more punk-rock than a bunch of grown men playing loud, fast, and furous brass instruments in peoples faces?" Mr. Moran asked. The slender percussionist and Connecticut native already had a reputation as an imaginative vibraphonist when he launched his Balkan project several years ago. And he wasn't even the first musician on the downtown New York jazz and improv scene to do so. Groups such as Pachora and Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio were plumbing similar material in the early 1990s.

But Mr. Moran's ensemble has taken on a life of its own. The melodies are strongly rooted in the tradition of Serbian Gypsy brass bands, with their mysterious "snake time" — weird, undulating meters — and violent exuberance, often juxtaposed with a keening melancholy. The players, who include several gifted jazz improvisers, bring their own voices to this style, taking songs far beyond the written page. 05/18/07 >> go there
Click Here to go back.