By DCist contributor Paul Ghosh-Roy

Is it a burlesque band? Gypsy rock? Electronic klezmer? Mediterranean dub? Carnival musicians in the off season’s? It’s difficult to categorize Balkan Beat Box’s sound, but you can call it good.

On Saturday night, six members of Balkan Beat Box donned their pig masks and came to Rosslyn to bring the Balkan dance party. Pig masks? Yes, this show started with the pig mask-bedecked band wandering through the aisles of the Rosslyn Spectrum, banging on snares and snaking through minor keys and modal horn lines like a band of gypsy troubadours. After making a pit stop in the middle of the audience to stand and bounce on the auditorium seats, the band returned to the stage and formally began the show.

Just by looking at the stage you get a feel for the myriad styles that Balkan Beat Box has at their disposal: drums, drum machines, percussion instruments, samplers, guitars, computers, a trumpet, saxophones, and a clarinet. From this eclectic mixture Balkan Beat Box conjures up a sound inclusive of klezmer, Bulgarian gypsy, Middle Eastern and North African, and dosed with live drums, electronic, dub and hip-hop beats. According to the band, its “New Mediterranean” sound (or Nu Med, as their latest album is entitled) is the result of sonically lifting the geographic borders of Mediterranean lands to free the sounds which politics separate. This concept is important to the Brooklyn-based band’s music, as Israeli band leaders Tamir Muskat, Ori Kaplan and Tomer Yosef are well acquainted with both the political separation and close physical and cultural proximity of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions.

Let there be no doubt that whatever else it may be, Balkan Beat Box is dance music, and on Saturday night the band came to party. Despite playing a seated venue, from the get-go, mohawk adorned MC Tomer Yosef urged the crowd to get up out of their seats and move to the front of the stage, triggering an electronic chicken sound from his sampler to cue the audience’s cheering. It was clear that to Yosef “MC” means move the crowd. And move the crowd he did, exhorting the audience to jump around as he asked what can only be called a rhetorical question: “do you want to dance?” As DCist’s roving reporter was, in fact, almost taken out by the enthusiastic bouncing and jumping of one dancer, the answer was clearly yes.

Balkan Beat Box played two sets and an encore, beginning their raucous show with a dirgelike dance jam, featuring the almost surf rock guitar stylings of a grey leisure-suited Jeremiah Lockwood. Indeed, it occurred to us that had Dick Dale donned a leisure suit and learned to play from gypsies, Lockwood may well have been the result. The band deftly moved between various styles, keeping the crowd moving with a bouncy beat under Yosef’s multilingual ragamuffin toasting. At times it seemed the bass player, while playing on a bass guitar, was doing his best to mimic the sound of a Roland 808 bass drop, while two pairs of snares provided a pounding marching beat. The live set’s bag of tricks also included sampled cuicas, guitar lines reminiscent of Ali Farka Toure, and a cover of Dawn Penn’s reggae classic “You Don’t Love Me.” But despite this eclectic mashup of disparate styles, the band did not seem trite or to be trying too hard, as the sound was always anchored by the bouncy electronic beats, bass, and trance inducing horn and guitar lines. Verily, this hypnotic blend provided a successful soundtrack for a Nu Med dance party. For world beat, electronic and dance music aficionados, Balkan Beat Box is not to be missed.