I mentioned O.M.F.O. on Yesterday’s Balkan Beat Box post and I thought I should post a few tracks off his new album “We are the Shepherds“. I’ve rambled about Our Man from Odessa lots of times, his mixture of traditional asian and Turkmenic sounds with modern sounds in a kitsch way has even attracted the attention of Borat. His latest album produced by Uwe Schmidt (aka Atom Heart & Senor Coconut and about 60 more nicknames) has some incredible songs, and some mediocre songs (I’m sorry). I can easily say that the song Azerbaijan has even entered my alltime favourites (you can listen to it on undomondo radioshow #3). Today I’ve featured the other song I’ve played on that mix, “Dagistan” which is an electrified Caucasus dance, and “Orbital Hora” which is a dubbified Hora (a traditional dance). If you’re not into Eastern sounds other than “mainstream oriental compilations” these songs could be a shocker for you.

However there’s something even more shocking and that’s a recent cd I had to chance to discover thanks to internet. That’s a cd by an Azerbaijani guitar virtuoso Mahmud Ismayiloglu called Past Days. If you’ve listened to O.M.F.O. and you’re saying “wth is this stuff I want more”, Ismayiloglu covers some Turkish & Indian music with an electric guitar he plays like a traditional Azerbaijani instrument called Tar. The first song “Aslanabad” is a very uptempo “wedding song”, it goes on for 9:16 and it never loses speed. I played it to a few friends and they all went searching for the eject button, because after the 5th minute it may really get on your nerves. The other song is simply called “Turk” and it’s a cover of a well known Turkish song I’m sure our Turkish readers will get.

I hope some of our readers don’t get annoyed by stuff like this because one of the friends I played it said “what’s the purpose of the existence of this music”, obviously he’s never heard of anything like cultural diversity, so this one goes to all the open minded fellas around the world. Peace.