Bombay Dub Orchestra – Tales From The Grand Bazaar

Here’s a free downtempo download from the Bombay Dub Orchestra.

Still on the ultra-relaxed Six Degrees Records, I’d rather forgotten about the Bombay Dub Orchestra in recent years. Theirs has always been a chill out comp existence for me. I don’t think I’ve ever bought one of their records. Though I have several of their tracks on various compilations and always enjoyed their head-nodding cinematic style. But I’ve heard nothing from them in the last five years.

This new album still has Indian strings and the pitter patter of tablas but it’s now acquired an array of Turkish instruments, including the oud and the sarod. The oud appears on the free download Bohemia Junction (Bohemia’s the western part of the moder-day Czech Republic) which keeps plenty of dubbingness. Stoke your hookah and play the music.

Free download: BOMBAY DUB ORCHESTRA – BOHEMIA JUNCTION

While we’re about it, here’s  my favourite remix of theirs, in which spaghetti western gets added to their worldwide blend.

Pistolero (Bombay Dub Orchestra Remix) – Juno Reactor

Blurb: Journeying has long held sway over man’s mind—the idea of travel can be as seductive as traveling itself, though never quite as instructive. The story behind Bombay Dub Orchestra’s new album, Tales From the Grand Bazaar (Six Degrees Records), was created over many years throughout five countries. Wherever Andrew T. Mackay and Garry Hughes might have started, they ended up somewhere completely unexpected.

Mackay and Hughes formed Bombay Dub Orchestra nearly ten years ago after visiting Bombay. Both men loved their experiences working with Indian orchestras and decided to pursue their compositional skills in the form of down- to midtempo electronica and, as their namesake suggests, dub. Three years of germination lead to their self-titled debut, released to great acclaim in 2006; two years later, 3 Cities hit the shelves.

Alongside unique originals, they’re renowned for globally minded remixes, having reworked the songs of Bob Marley, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Bebel Gilberto and many others. This worldly mentality continued as recording sessions for Grand Bazaar saw them bouncing around the United States and London, through the Bombay and Delhi they know so well, as well as into Kingston, Jamaica to work alongside the legendary team of Sly & Robbie.

While beats and bass are pivotal players, it is the composition and stringed instruments that really shine throughout these nine tracks. That is, in part, due to an unmentioned city thus far, which is the very meeting point of East and West—a perfect underscore for their entire career.

“Istanbul is a melting pot, literally,” says Mackay. “The Grand Bazaar was completed in 1461 and is a concrete-covered market with 5,000 stores and 60 streets. We imagined all the stories that have occurred in there over the centuries. The album was certainly inspired by stories that perhaps these traders and the many men or women in cafes and stalls were telling.”

~ by acidted on September 21, 2013.