This Week on LinkTV

Video Premiere: Budoár Staré Dámy (The Old Lady’s Boudoir) Czech Republic

This Czech band formed in 1999 while some of the members were only sixteen (the average age is now nineteen!). Not EXACTLY a girl group (there are two males in the quintet) the three females (Marta Svobodová - guitar/vocal, Dasha Matûjíãková - bass and Eva Svobodová - violin/vocal) are most emphatically up front. Stepan Svoboda plays drums/microphone and Ondra Klíã plays guitar/microphone. This impressively imaginative video is by lead singer and bandleader Marta Svobodová. She calls her videos "kukohyby" ("watch-moves") and she directs and records them herself. The lyric simply tells of a dream about trees, but the video turns it into a dream within a dream, in which one prisoner can escape his cell….at least, when he dreams. Watch the Video Find the music

This Week's Documentary: 'Festival in the Desert: The Tent Sessions

The Festival in the Desert held outside Timbuktu has become the destination of choice for World Music cogniscenti. Initially conceived as a way for the nomadic Tuareg people to unite with their brethren who had been disbursed by a now resolved political upheaval, it has transformed into a splendid event; one that has attracted some of the best musicians that West Africa has to offer. In a joint production with Link TV, Sean Barlow and Banning Eyre of Afropop WorldWide sought out and filmed the spontaneous sessions that occurred in the tents peppering the sand dunes around the festival site. More...find the music

This Week's Video Block: Basque Music

The Basques have a language all their own, and a lineage that stretches back to prehistory. Their identity is especially strong in their music, and this block shows what is going on in traditional as well as more forward-looking ventures. The first entries are from a young and very talented band called Bidaia. Two unusual instruments that appear in their videos are the hurdy gurdy (sometimes called the medieval synthesizer!) and the very Basque double horn, the alboka. more... Next we have a performance by Juan Mari Beltran, an ethnomusicologist who has been quite a standard bearer for Basque music, and percussion piece, played on the Txalaparta. The kind of teamwork required to play this instrument may have developed out of harvesting activities. Alboka is one of the Basque's best known groups. They have recently scooped up Hungarian folk pioneer Marta Sebestyèn to sing with them on a regular basis and her duet with Eliseo Parra, 'Trapatan,' is a beautiful combination of the lyrical and rhythmic. more...

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