"ZION UNIT is an art ensemble originally from Reunion Island and based in France, UK and Israël. His musical work is an exotic and disorder opera kitsch, intimate, baroque, tinted soul, funk, trip hop, moods filmesques, colors and ethnic psychedelics."
The project Hadar, by musician Naamah Bat-Sarah, is a "Jewish Zionist themed avant-garde musical project" that combines "Ambient, Neoclassical, Experimental/Post-Industrial, Neofolk, and Acoustic/Electronic styles." Hadar's free-for-download album "Khanike" alternates between drones and drums, militant dissonance and open dreamscapes. As Bat-Sarah notes below, Khanike expresses the"real moods and emotions in the ancient Khanike story, on what it must have been like for the Jews at the time of the Maccabean Revolts and re-dedication of the Temple (albeit with modernized soundscapes)." There is a deep brooding and feeling of loneliness to the music. There is also a slow developing sense of foreboding, but the slow development and the limited set of tones becomes burdensome by the seventh track / seventh day. While the eight track / eight day is sufficiently varied from the previous tracks, and in many ways more engaging that the previous days, it doesn't feel like the resolution I was looking for. I would have loved to hear Hadar push further in exploring the emotional and sonic landscape."Hadar literally means "To Honor" or "Glory/Splendor" in Hebrew. The concept of Hadar -- pride in and knowledge of Jewish tradition, faith, culture, land, history, strength, pain and peoplehood. Hadar is the need to have pride in Judaism and not allow it to be disgraced and defiled by beating and desecration of Jewish honor. This is the concept that the great Jewish leader Zev Jabotinsky attempted to instill in the oppressed and degraded masses of Eastern Europe 70 years ago. The anti-Semite's hatred and contempt of the Jew is an attempt to degrade us. It is an attempt to instill within the Jew a feeling of inferiority. It is an attempt that, all too often, succeeds in promoting Jewish self-hatred and shame in an attempt to escape one's Jewishness. Hadar is pride. Hadar is self-respect. Hadar is dignity in being a Jew."Teruah: According to your self-description, you think of yourself as "a Jewish Zionist themed avant-garde musical project" and you name-check Zev Jabotinsky as an influence. I am familiar with music across the Jewish spectrum, but I don't run into that set of influences very often. Daniel Kahn's music, "Six Million Germans" in particular, mines similar territory of strong Jewish action, but as a Yiddish social-anarchist he's the opposite of a Jabotinsky Zionist. I was hoping you could tell me more about this. How did you come to this particular set of influences and where do you see it taking you as a musician? Do you see yourself as having clear peers in the Jewish music community or are you out on your own?
The first album, Darshan's "Lishma EP" has taken me a month or so of listening to get into it, but I'm getting there. Here's their official blurb...Darshan is "astral rap, liturgical jazz, audio alchemy. Harmonizing Hebrew chant with hiphop, folk rock with electro-pop, love poetry with kabbalistic psychology, Darshan is a unique and organic weave of world wisdom traditions and modern musical styles"Darshan is a project of one of my favorite new vocalists, Shir Yaakov, and rapper & producer Eprhyme. Driven by Shir Yaakov's liturgical melodies and slow slow slow delivery and built on Ephrhyme's equally slow, staticky productions, this album sounds in many ways more like an Aphex Twin electronica album than it does hip-hop. I'm not sure that it works. There's a riskiness; a certain urban dreaminess to it that I can appreciate, but also a certain grinding tedium I can't. I'm told by folks that have seen them that their live show is outstanding. I can believe it. The raw material in these tracks is great. I could see Yotzer Or, my favorite track on the album, shaking the house. I can imagine the interplay between Shir Yaakov's melodic vocals and Ephryme staccato rap. The EP, though, seems held back by the lack of stage energy.
"Dreams in Static conjures up the aesthetic of James Bond, Prefuse 73, & Pulp Fiction. Each song is the soundtrack to a film in a genre of its own. This is music that exists beyond pop and yet overflows with it. Serene Poetic strikes a balance between Diwon, a Brooklyn-based hip-hop producer, and Dugans, a multifaceted guitarist-composer from Texas. Using live drums, samplers, analog synths, electric pianos and guitars, Dreams in Static transcends genres and breathes new life and depth with each subsequent listen. The album teems with life, beauty and depth; it's an instrumental masterpiece that resurrects live instrumental music and guitar-based symphonies. It pops in a world where popular music has been left in a state of static."Ok. Whew. That's a lot to cram into an album. And the album feels a bit crammed into. I'm an electronica fan from way back and can be really happy with broad-brush sonic adventures like this. At its best, this recording is happily deconstructive, breaking down pop genres into bits and reassembling them into long tone poems. My favorite tracks, including American Pastoral and Standing in Shadow live up to hype. They have a rich internal life that gets me immediately invested. Many of the tracks, though, sound more like demo reels than a movie soundtracks. Sounds flicker and weave, but never resolve into anything. I really dug this album when I first listened, but over repeated listening it didn't wear well. Your mileage may vary...check Dreams in Static out on their myspace page and in this video. Let me know what you think.
How embarrassing. I was chatting online last night with a fine fellow who was looking for klezmer electronica music. I made a few suggestions including my blog posts on Zohar, GhettoPlotz, Jewdyssee, Anakronic Electro Orkestra, Socalled, and Oi Va Voi. So where's the Oi Va Voi link?"Oi Va Voi is a British band that takes its name from a Yiddish-derived exclamation popular in modern Hebrew meaning, approximately "Oh, dear!" It is an experimental band from London, England, which formed in the late 1990s. Their sound draws on Jewish music from both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions, including both klezmer and Ladino music, as well as Eastern European, especially Hungarian folk music, as well as contemporary electronic music."Any wonder I love these guys? They've got four albums out, including the brand new "Travelling The Face of the Globe." I actually don't own any yet, mostly because they're not available on eMusic. Writing this post reminds me I going to need pickup them up soon.
I've got a disc spinning right now that I just don't know what to do with. It's loaded with Spanish guitar, electronica beats, and infectuous pop hooks, and some serious love. It's also majorly uneven, amaturish, with reedy vocals, a stiff drum machine, and a go for broke "throw every sequencer patch at it" enthusiasm. Whew. So bottom line ... Reb Dovidle's self-arranged, performed, produced, and promoted album "Koach! and Ashrey! and More" isn't a fabulous album. 
I've got a new toy...Deezer. Deezer is a French music on demand service that, as you'd expect, has great coverage of the European scene. One interesting disc I ran across today is Nproject - 1/Berechit from Geneva, Switzerland. The disc has a variety of Jewish standards, mostly prayers and zemirot, done in a jazzy electronica style. The concept isn't exactly new, this territory has been mined in the past by Wally Brill's "Covenant", "Forgiveness: Traditional Jewish Prayers With Contemporary Electronic Music", and Gershon Kingsley's "God is a Moog" and a variety of others. But the style of jazzy downtempo that presented here works. Maybe not A list, but solid. But..as they said, it's more than an album. It's an overriding urge."NProject is more than an album, it’s an overriding urge to compose a collection of albums intended to build a musical link between men. The aim is to ask artists of all ages, from all different sorts of backgrounds, believers, atheists or agnostics, brought up in every kind of religion and tradition, to get together and merge their talents to create from traditional songs and prayers a sound that exceeds the individual and reaches out to the universe. Title after title, the collection will offer a trip round the world, visiting different cultures and questioning accepted ideas. The first album in the collection, Berechit (at the beginning), reexamines traditional Jewish prayers and songs, drawing up from the roots the juice that will revitalise the tree. Featuring singers and musicians of all ages – the youngest is only 10 and the oldest over 70 – and from all religious faiths. A soothing album, “Hebrew voices against a rich background of soaring electronic sounds and haunting jazz. From under the crushing millstone of the great religions, a breath of sweet air seeps out.” Gabriel Catagnier, Edelweiss, May 2008"So of course, I have to grump here. (I feel like I've been doing a lot of grumping lately) While Mr. Catagnier, a reviewer, thought it was clever to be insulting to Judaism at the same time he waxes poetic about the merits of the "Hebrew voices", I can't imagine why the publishers of the disc thought it was clever to quote him. I guess you can only "visit different cultures" if you also "question accepted ideas" loudly and rudely. Whatever. But check the disc out. It's a good listen.
Anyway, sorry for the long preamble but I had an unexpected "peeking behind the curtain" moment on Friday morning. I was at work, clickity-clacking on my computer keyboard and random shuffling through music as I often do. I was pretty engrossed in my work and only half paying attention to what I was listening to. All of a sudden I heard that signature swooping cantorial "Echod" from the Erran Baron Cohen's worldbeat group Zohar's track of that name. (See my post on Zohar). Great. I love this track. But it wasn't. It was the same swoop, but followed by more cantorial swoopiness. I was listening to the original recording that got sampled by Cohen.
I don't have may cantorial recordings in my collection (a whole in collection), but it turns out that track 4 of "Mysteries of the Sabbath: Classic Cantorial Recordings 1907-47", Pierre Pintchick's "Rozo D’Shabbos" is Cohen's sound source. And I was excited to make the discovery. And then I was sad that a bit of magic had gone out of the Zohar track. And then I realized I was being an idiot about the whole thing and went back to work. (But it was rather fun.)About two years ago I stumbled onto one of the bands that, for my ears, would define my musical interests for years to come. That band is the Argentinian-born, Paris based, Gotan Project. (In fact, you can say my current favorite area of music is a triangle defined by Gotan Project, the New York band Firewater, and the SF combo Davka.) Gotan Project isn't a Jewish project, but it's fine music. The combo made the observation that their beloved Argentinian Tango, with it's slow lush romanticism, would blend perfectly with the emerging electronica style called 'downtempo.' And they were powerfully right. The electronica context lets them deconstruct and reassemble Tango, widening it's compositional space while remaining true to it's defining musical motifs and ornamentations.
Check out my talk at the Ann Arbor District Library last year. "Ignite Second Stage: The Silver Age of American Jewish Music is Happening Now! And You're Missing It!"
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