Pitchfork

Sun City Girl Alan Bishop has been scratching our world music itch for some time now with his Seattle-based Sublime Frequencies imprint-- and when we say world music, we don't mean that hokey, over-produced shit your yoga instructor listens to.

Bishop and his partners in crime mine the innermost nooks, crannies, and niches of exotic locales to bring us pampered peoples of the information age documents of raw, unadulterated foreign music culture as real as we can hope for nowadays.

One of those partners, world traveler and filmmaker Hisham Mayet, has contributed a number of DVDs to Sublime Frequencies' eclectic output, including visual pieces exploring the regional musical treasures of Libya, Niger, and Thailand. Mayet's latest offering, Musical Brotherhoods From the Trans-Saharan Highway, captures Moroccan street musicians and premiered at ArthurBall last February. If you missed it there, don't fret: the film screens in several U.S. cities beginning tomorrow night in New York.

According to a press release, Musical Brotherhoods "showcases an assortment of spectacular musical dramas presented live and unfiltered on the home turf of the world's most dynamic string/drum specialists performing and manifesting the ecstatic truth!

"Ancient mystical brotherhoods have been flourishing for centuries in and around the cities of Marrakesh and Essaouira in Morocco where the trade caravans have gathered from their long journeys across the Trans-Saharan Highway.

"This is some of the last great street music on Earth."

Check out the trailer for Musical Brotherhoods here. Mayet will be on hand for question and answer sessions at all screenings except Cleveland (where Alan Bishop and Mark Gergis' Sumatran Folk Cinema will also screen). As a bonus, folks in Baltimore can catch Mayet's Niger: Magic and Ecstasy in the Sahel as well. We might be going out on a limb here, but we're going to assume all of these films will be better than Night at the Museum.

Sun City Girls play Berlin's Volksbuhne Theater on January 25.

Musical Brotherhoods:

01-05 New York, NY - Anthology Film Archives (two screenings)
01-06 Philadelphia, PA - International House
01-07 Baltimore, MD - The 5th Floor *
01-09 Boston, MA - Infrasound
01-19 Cleveland, OH - TBA ^

* with Niger: Magic and Ecstasy in the Sahel
^ with Sumatran Folk Cinema