Landmasses of the Madison World Music Festival: North America

In a mere four days, this year's Madison World Music Festival (Sept. 16-19) will attempt to give Madison a free, flesh-and-blood hookup to four continents. To help Madison listeners prepare for this abrupt and all-too-brief global transport, The A.V. Club will examine how the festival lineup represents several vast chunks of ground that could devour Wisconsin like an after-dinner mint. In our second installment, it's time to ask just what the hell is going on right here on our own patch of solid dirt.

Size: 9,449,460 square miles

Chief World Music Festival exports: Wanton inter-ethnic identity confusion; perversely weird outfits; skanking.

Tips for visitors: "But we're already here!," you may say. But you haven't really come to terms with the side of yourselves you'll have to confront at the Festival. Something has gone delightfully wrong.

Traditions: Though the World Music Festival's lineup includes several acts based in the States and one from Mexico, it's careful to steer around the usual folk-music traditions that come to mind. (Other yearly events have those sounds covered pretty well anyway). Instead, it serves as a reminder to purists that the Americas have always been excellent at forcing cultures and nationalities to collide and get filthy with each other, usually with fiery and weird results.

Brushes with the 21st century: Still, it takes a certain modern self-awareness to engineer such cross-breeds as Mexico City's Los De Abajo and Chicago's Mucca Pazza. Los De Abajo will storm the Willy Street Fair's WMF stage on Saturday like Mexico's answer to the Mekons, wrapping various branches of traditional Mexican music, Latin pop, ska, and punk into one unruly, fast-burning bundle. Cackling in the face of potential disaster, the band welds together its horn section, punkish guitars, and the folksy melodic warmth of such elements as accordion, all of it jonesing on chaos and hyped-up leftist conviction.

Mucca Pazza, slated for two Friday sets at the Terrace, draws tuneful inspiration from Eastern European music, marching-band music, and punk-rock, but that's nothing compared to its presentation. It's an actual marching band, complete with a few hundred pounds of brass; a drum line; violins and electric guitar amplified through helmet-mounted speakers when necessary; ridiculous marching-band uniforms; and cheerleaders. This can add up to as many as 30 band members at any given show, so if the weather holds, watching them storm the Terrace should be about as jackass-gonzo fun as live music gets. Oh, and for both sets, MP will be joined by whimsical stilt-walking troupe Dragon Knights, literally elevating the evening's level of insanity to precarious heights.