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.