mp3: AMSTERDAM KLEZMER BAND ispjenzola (la boutique fantastique remix)
there are so many contemporary remix albums of what might be broadly termed as ‘traditional world music’, that those remixes have ultimately developed into a sub-genre of their own. for every misconceived ‘global groove’ project, there is a richly successful endeavour waiting to redress the balance. the recent cheb i sabbah album scores highly; higher still, last years ‘electric gypsyland’ collection featuring outstanding reworks of romania’s taraf de haidouks.
out of the traps this month is the remix variations of the amsterdam klezmer band; a group from the netherlands driving high-octane traditional eastern european, gypsy-balkan-klezmer music. celebrating their tenth anniversary this year, the band’s popularity grew largely thanks to their renowned street performances and their remarkable festival appearances. latterly, the band dabbled in club-based events and started to experiment with samplers and drum machines. rather than attempt to introduce those into their work themselves, they took the smarter route of inviting friends and family to mutate their source material.
fresh from the remarkable success of his bucovina club albums, shantal opens ‘amsterdam klezmer band remixed’ with a dub-infused rhythm that inspires a call to dance – setting a tone for most of the tracks that follow. in fact, it’s the dub excursions that are the most successful, particularly m. cornelisse‘s ‘pluk-a-dub’ and p. millenaar‘s ‘harmandalidib’. oddly, the most well-known artist on the compilation, zuco 103, turns in a rather languid effort; leaving la boutique fantastique to pick up the gong for drawing on all that is enjoyable about klezmer and filtering it through some spectacular bass-heavy distortion on the above track, ‘ispjenzola’. unusually, it’s an album that will perhaps appeal to both the traditionalists and the modernists alike and, even more impressively, achieves that balance without a whiff of compromise.
more on akb at amsterdamklezmerband.nl and essayrecordings.com. download a wmv of a live performance here.