Here's a twist on American urban music -- a style bouncing back to us after a trip 'round the globe. It's hip-hop. And it's traditional Chinese music. (OK, Taiwanese, but culturally speaking, it's Chinese -- one of 'em plays the suona, after all.)

Kou Chou Ching rap in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka. Instead of sampling funk and jazz, they sample traditional Taiwanese and Chinese music.

"[W]e are Taiwanese, and we can't copy everything African-American,'' adds Lin, who takes inspiration from his father's collection of Taiwanese folk records. ``Though we are playing hip-hop, we are sampling our own.''

And this is the kind of stuff I love:

After starting in the freestyle rap circuit, Lin and Chiang moved into music production and started sampling traditional Taiwanese music and opera.

``In Taiwan, (traditional) music is harder to find,'' says Chiang, 27, ``because people don't have the patience to listen to it anymore. Many will sell (recordings) to secondhand stores, who won't take it seriously. So we have to look at eBay and Yahoo.''

Many of the hip-hop bands in Taiwan are more derivative of the ones in America and don't sample traditional music, Chiang says.

``Much of the younger generation feel that traditional music is old and lame,'' Lin says.

Hip-hop as an archival exercise... now that's cool.

And they have pretty good flow.

Listen to their MySpace page (yeah, everyone has a MySpace page). I like "Black Heart," myself. Can't really understand what they're saying, but it sounds good. I can tell somebody has been listening to some Chuck D over there in Taiwan.

Curious about the name?

Chou Ching refers to the hard work of autumn harvesting. Meanwhile Kou has to do with the harvesters scythe. Together, the three words give the feeling of laborers plying their tools to bring in the harvest.

Curious about the genre? There's a list of Taiwanese hip-hop groups over at wikipedia.