High Quality World Beat.
Babylon Halt is a decent length for an album; there’s more than an hour’s worth of music that dips into various styles but holds together as a cohesive album too. The overall feel is of a fusion of various kinds of ‘world music’ with more mainstream styles such as trip hop, drum’n’bass, dub and downtempo electronica. There’s a distinct Turkish feel to the opening track, The Walls of Byzantium, with very evocative strings and funky percussion. Rock the Howdah sounds like it is rooted in London’s Asian Underground scene from a few years back, while Budayeen 3am evokes the sound of a late night blues club on another planet. Many of the 13 tracks on this album have very danceable grooves played on non-Western percussion instruments, along with funky breakbeats and there’s some expressive guitar playing too on Gulshan I Raz.
