Duuuude . . . .

Update (9/3/14):  The video's already down, so here's someone's not-bad iPhone video of the first couple of songs from DakhaBrakha's impressive set, and judging from the angle, he must have been standing right next to, or at least very near, me.  Follow the YouTube link for the entire mind-blowing set (recommended).  The closest analogy I can think of to describe their music is this is what it would probably sound like if Dirty Projectors decided to reimagine King Crimson's Larks Tongues in Aspic as a near-eastern folk opera.

Update II (9/3/14): Writing about Poland's OFF Festival and Sub-Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman's interests in Poland, Emily Nokes writes in The Stranger, "the act that blew me away was a band I'd never heard of. And definitely didn't know how to pronounce. And almost didn't even see."

"It was the final day of OFF, and I was in a cab with Megan Jasper, Sub Pop's vice president, and Tony Kiewel . . . when Kiewel received a text message from Poneman that simply said 'omfg.' Apparently that's not the kind of text message anyone is used to receiving from him, and we all laughed thinking it was a really weird thing to send with no follow-up. We headed to the food tent where . . . I kept hearing drums and screaming from the experimental tent and finally decided to see what the fuss was. OMFG indeed. 

They were called DakhaBrakha, and it was three women and one man seated on the stage. The women were wearing what looked to be ornate white wedding dresses and giant furry cone hats. The man was dressed in traditional Turkish formal wear. The women sang haunting folk songs, their voices twisting in harmonies that almost didn't sound human. As the music amped up, two of the women beat drums with a percussive force usually reserved for the heavy-metal genre. Someone played a stringed instrument that sounded like icebergs moving. The crowd was both wound up and mesmerized, packed in and screaming and yelling. 

'DakhaBrakha were so thrilling, so spellbinding, and so utterly moving, it was an event unto itself,' Poneman said later. There was OFF, and then there was DakhaBrakha. They were enchanting and unlike anything that I've ever seen before. He called it 'the performance of the festival' and bemoaned that DakhaBrakha was 'not on the Sub Pop roster... yet.'

DakhaBrakha played Bumbershoot last weekend, too. Even though they were scheduled on the hottest day of the festival, they played with the same mesmerizing energy (and woolly cone hats!) as before." 

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Well, if you have 12 hours to spare and nothing else to do, you can watch this entire video, apparently the raw feed for the video screen at the Fisher Green Stage at Bumbershoot yesterday (Monday), including the long, uneventful passages between sets.

But if you do have a life, here are the Cliff notes: Morocco's Hoba Hoba Spirit start at the 2:23:02 mark; Ukraine's DahkaBrakha begin at the 3:51:08 mark; the Mexican Institute of Sound kick off at the 5:42:30 mark; and Columbia's Bomba Estereo at the 7:25:12 mark.  After that are Neon Trees and Aer, but you're on your own for that.  

I'm posting this whole thing because I strongly recommend the DahkaBrakha segment - words cannot describe, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

I'd like to say that I'm not narcissistic enough to watch through the whole thing for shots of myself in the audience, but I did spot the back of my head beneath a black ball cap at a few points in the DahkaBrakha set, and you can see me dancing like an idiot to the Mexican Institute of Sound in a few places.

I'm not sure how long this video will stay active.  The Fisher Green feed from Saturday has been muted because of a copyright claim, and the feed from Sunday, which included Kishi Bashi's and Pickwick's sets, has been blocked altogether.  So my advice is if you're even mildly curious, watch now before this one disappears, too.