Join us as we talk to Chaia (she/her), a Jewish dance music artist who makes Kleztronica - electronic and techno music that uses samples from yiddish and klezmer music. Chaia’s first single is out TODAY and we are so excited to share our conversation with her where she talks all things yiddish, techno, kleztronica, and everything in between.
Listen to Chaia's new single, Borough Park, out as of 9/13/24.
If you are in NYC, check out the Diasporic Techno Night Chaia mentions, happening Friday 9/13 all evening.
If you’re on the West coast, Chaia has lots of events coming up there! You can also find her at the Pop Montreal Festival. You can find all her events on her website.
Chaia writes about her single, “Borough Park samples my grandmother describing her childhood growing up in Borough Park. She would always tell me a story of her childhood there by prefacing it with “this might shock you.” Her childhood in the Jewish community there was very different than we imagine Jewish community operating today. It was pluralistic, interdenominational, mixed gender, mixed class. It sounds like the community that I imagine creating today. A community that I found small microcosms of in the queer Jewish, anti-state, and klezmer communities. A community that I’ve also found in the techno world. This is a story of that community paired with a Yiddish song called Oyfn Oyvn (sung here by a young Ethel Raim), which talks about a girl who convinces a boy to sit with her on an oven not by appealing to his background, or by physical force, but with gentle love and embrace."
Chaia is a wealth of knowledge and she shares so much of it with us in this episode. Some of the things she mentions are:
- The book, "Assembling a Black Counter Culture" by Deforrest Brown Jr
- The Clear the Floor collective
- The Yiddish Song of the Week archive
- Hankus Netsky - NECMusic
- Juan Atkins (the "Godfather of techno")
- The Ruth Rubin archive
- Itzik Gottesman
- Ethel Raim
- Lily Henley fellow musician making Ladino music
- Micah Simone, Jewish-Egyptian-American dance artist
- Avia Moore, who also runs the Klez Kanada festival
- Pepi Litman - The Yiddish drag king
- The Yiddish New York festival
- LEVYOSN - the Klezmer band Chaia is part of
Thank you to Chaia for joining us, Jessie for editing the podcast, and Nate for the podcast music. If you are interested in supporting our work, you can do so here.
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