Kleztronica is Yiddish techno
How Chaia fuses Yiddish folk samples with melodies and rhythms to create a new kind of electronic protest music
In 2017, New York-based Chaia started making “kleztronica”, a blend of traditional klezmer music, samples, live singing and cerebral, unwieldy techno. Seven years later she is heralded as the founder and leader of the steadily growing genre and her distinctive, wildly inventive music has taken her to perform as far as Berlin, Vienna, and this week, London. Next week, she’ll head up a showcase of SWANA and Yiddish electronic music across five venues and five events, including a headline event at Jupiter Disco on September 13 showcasing diasporic techno and supporting DJs Against Apartheid’s fundraising efforts. We spoke about preserving Yiddish culture, standing against Zionism and the parallels between Yiddish anarchism and the more radical corners of the underground.
How would you describe klezmer music to someone who had never heard of it?
Klezmer music is a style of Eastern European dance music that originated in the 1500s and 1600s. Often, klezmer was a word that was used to describe the musicians who are playing the genre. And these travelling klezmers would go from town to town in eastern Europe playing Jewish weddings and festivals and different events, and developed this really unique style of traditional dance music.
Is this a style of music you heard a lot of when you were younger? Were your parents also musicians?
No, but my dad is a Jewish Studies teacher, so I grew up sort of surrounded by a lot of Jewish musicians because he would be in and out of all these different Jewish cultural spaces.
So you were exposed to a lot of Jewish and Yiddish music from an early age?
Yeah. I grew up on the Upper West Side, so I was surrounded by a lot of different kinds of Jewish music and Jewish expression, but the Yiddish really stuck out to me, even as a kid. I met the person who is now my mentor, Basya Schechter, when I was eight years old. She also goes plays in the 7-piece world music group Pharaoh's Daughter and is an amazing Yiddish musician, she taught me a lot.
I read somewhere that your father teaches Jewish mysticism.
Yeah, kind of the same thing as Jewish studies. He specialises in this subset of Jewish thought called Kabbalah. His specialty is this book called the Zohar, which was written in Spain in the 13th century. All the books that were inspired by that is where he’s centred.
All I know about Kabbalah is that Madonna and a bunch of celebrities got into it, I don’t know, 15 years ago or whenever it was. I remember it being a thing for a while there.
Yeah, it was very trendy. I think with any sort of mystical, especially near-Eastern mystical traditions, you’re going to have some weird white women doing weird shit. I mean, the people making this are racialized as white but you're always gonna have this kind of appropriation into hegemonic whiteness.
(Laughing) Totally, totally. So when did you start getting into making music yourself and singing and stuff?
I've been making music ever since I was a kid. I saw someone playing accordion on the train, and I really fell in love with it, then I started playing accordion when I was 14. In high school, I started playing in a klezmer band, so I was playing traditional accordion and in Jewish bands.
How hard was it to find klezmer bands to play in as a teenager? Are there a few of them around?
Yeah, the klezmer scene is extremely tight knit. So once you find one person who plays klezmer, you're sort of opened up to the whole klezmer world. As soon as I met a klezmer musician, who was my accordion teacher at the time, Zoe Christiansen, I started meeting hundreds and hundreds of klezmer musicians because the community is just so tight knit.
At what point did you start thinking about incorporating electronic elements into klezmer music?
For me, electronic music almost came first. When I was really little, I would listen to the radio, and I remember being around seven or eight and hearing an instrument on the radio that I didn't recognize. I asked someone, what is this instrument? And they were like, it's a synthesiser. And that sort of broke my brain. I started asking a million questions about synthesisers and when I was about to enter high school I got Logic and I started making beats. I was basically very hip-hop oriented in my beat making, because that's what I was hearing on the radio. And I was making beats for rappers and selling beats to rappers. But almost as soon as I started making electronic music, I found that it was a really male world. Even the boys in my middle school would say, oh, Kaia, you make electronic music, you should just listen to Jhené Aiko. Or, you know, listen to some woman who has nothing to do with your genre or what you're trying to make. To be clear, Jhené Aiko is amazing, but it was this feeling of immediately being rejected by the genre and being rejected by the scene. I felt a lot more accepted by folk music when I started to play the accordion, because the klezmer community is so small and so tight knit, and people always want there to be more people playing klezmer. I was immediately enveloped into this world where people were like, we need you, we want you, we want you to be playing this genre of music, and that felt very affirming. I have eventually found that in electronic music, it just took a little bit longer.
Do you remember some of the earliest electronic music that you were into?
Oh, it's so embarrassing. Like, Zedd, and I was really into the world of Danny Brown and hip- hop and how he crafted his sonic world. I just remember Zedd was the song on the radio when I asked what that instrument was.
Do you remember what the song was?
I think it was “Beautiful Now”. Great song, still. That synth line on the second verse still hits. But it wasn't until college that I really started to combine this music, because I started learning more about the histories of electronic music and the history of klezmer, and I started seeing more and more similarities and ways in which they could fit.
What kind of similarities were you seeing?
I think for me, the focal point of my craft is sampling. And I think, starting to learn about the radical histories of techno and house music in Chicago and Detroit, and seeing all the sampling, and I think you see the same in different kinds of Black music, like jazz or whatever. But really, seeing sampling as a way of keeping the music traditional and a way of honouring generations really stood out to me as something I was seeing in klezmer music. I was seeing my klezmer musician friends, really, really carefully transcribe – and I think you see this in other Black music, like jazz — but they would really carefully transcribe every single note that this person was playing or singing. So for example, they were listening to an early recording from the turn of the century and someone was singing this wordless melody called a nigun, and then they cough, and then the next person, every time they sing it they cough too. So that really exact transcription is a really exact honouring of the ancestors. I think with sampling, it's in some ways even more direct because you're taking this music and plopping it into a new song. I was making house and techno by this point, so it felt like the same kind of process. I also saw a world in house and techno that I wanted more of in the klezmer scene, and that I was experiencing in Boston. I was going to raves thrown by this Black and indigenous collective called Clear the Floor. And I was seeing radical rave lineage and practice, and the ways in which the underground could be this space for radical thought and anarchism and collectivism. I had also been an anarchist since I was a kid and Yiddish also has a tradition of anarchism and radical thought. But I felt like this rave space was so magical, and it felt like a tool that could deepen and enrich my own culture.
When you say you had been an anarchist since you were a kid, how did that come about?
I think I always was. You know when you're a kid and you're just taught that everyone has to love each other? I think I was really headstrong, and was just like, okay, that's the first thing I learned, that’s what I'm gonna stick with. When I learned about government and different kinds of hierarchy, it didn't really make sense in my brain. And then in high school, I had a radical history teacher who introduced me to Murray Bookchin. That changed my whole life and made me feel like, wow, there are people who see the world the way I do. Bookchin passed in 2008, he was a Jewish anarchist who grew up in the Jewish labor organising space, but then went more radical, and then later inspired radical movements in Rojava and radical Kurdish movements today.
How did you find the response to you making kleztronica music when you first started doing it, in 2017?
It was always so accepted from the very start. I think partly because the klezmer scene had become like family. Even internationally, I knew all these people because we would go to these festivals every year. There's a festival called Yiddish New York that's a week of Yiddish music and klezmer music. There's a festival called KlezKanada, where you all go off to a summer camp in Canada and learn about Yiddish music. I was spending these long periods of time basically living with the people in the Yiddish scene. And so, like the best kind of family, they wanted to see me flourish. There's such a culture in the Yiddish and classical world of reinvention and radical reimagining of this work and remaking it into something alive and beautiful. So I think it was very much in line with other radical reinvention movements that have been happening in klezmer since the turn of the century.
Would you say you grew up in quite a progressive household culturally and politically?
I think it's complicated. I went to Zionist day school. Any Jewish day school is a Zionist day school, but I think it was important to my Dad that I get a really good Jewish education. But my Dad and my Mom would tell me, “Hey, like, maybe don't fully trust everything you hear.” We like to criticise Israel, and I think I grew up in a fairly progressive community, and also religiously. My dad grew up Orthodox, but he left when he was 19, and I think he really taught me that I could invent my Judaism the way that I wanted to, and invent my relationship to the culture without any kind of dogma. My Dad's from New York. My mom's from Portland, Oregon. Her dad's from New York, but she grew up in Portland and then moved to New York for work.
When your Dad left the Orthodox tradition when he was 19, how did his family respond?
I mean, he was modern Orthodox, so it definitely wasn't like leaving a Haredi community or an ultra religious community. I think they were maybe unhappy or disappointed, but ultimately he kept really strong relationships with them. My Dad's whole extended family was very, very present in my life growing up, even if we had different ways of practising our religion, and my Dad would always tell me to never be ashamed of the fact that we didn't, keep kosher to the strictest degree, or keep Shabbat in the strictest sense. We were still able to have these really deep relationships with my Dad's family, which continue to this day.
What do you use to make your music?
For the last few years, I've really heavily relied on an SP404 MKII, which is just like a basic sampler. You load an audio file and push the button. Almost all of the samples that I use in my work are from this archive of Yiddish folk songs called the Ruth Rubin archive, and there's 3000 Yiddish songs on there, and people can join it if they want to learn more about what Yiddish songs are.. I really relied on the SP404 for my creative process and for figuring out how to integrate the samples. But because the SP doesn't have stem separation for recording, I would always just use Ableton and Logic; Logic for in-depth audio processing, and Ableton to put everything together to actually make the tracks. More and more though I'm starting to butt up against the limitations of the SP404, and I'm going to need to switch to an Ableton Live trigger setup in the next 10 months or so. I’m also really reliant on CDJs when I do more heavy techno sets, and I’m singing as well. I study Yiddish song pretty intensively and I try to sing in a traditional style so I can use my own voice as a sample.
What do you typically sing about?
At this point, I only sing traditional Yiddish songs, and I try to create songs that have radical relationships to both the samples and also the messaging of the song. A lot of my songs have speaking samples in it, whether it be political speeches or a recording of my grandma talking. I'm releasing a track on September 13 that is about my grandmother's childhood in Brooklyn, and it opens with a recording of her speaking. She talks about how her orthodoxy was very fluid growing up in Borough Park, and how they had mixed dancing and a lot of partying and a lot of flexibility, and it was interdenominational and inter-class. I take these speaking samples or these kinds of political ideas or messages that I'm trying to convey and try to find Yiddish songs that align with them. So I picked this folk song called “Oyfn Oyvn Zitst A Meydl”, which translates to “On an oven”. It’s about a girl, she's sitting on an oven, and a boy comes to her, and he grabs at the thread she's sewing, and she says, ‘Don't grab at this thread. Instead, I'm going to make you sit here with me, and I won't ask you where you're from, and I won't hold you here with force, but I will embrace you with love and tenderness.” And then they have sex in the oven. It was for me a radical example of Yiddish in its most transgressive, non-religious radical setting, and then also an example of radical, interpersonal embrace. So I felt like it aligned.
Are there particular themes that you tend to draw from when selecting your samples?
My work is almost always about radical collectivity, and is often in opposition to the Zionist tradition. It’s about transgressing other kinds of societal boundaries and hierarchies and often drawing from this radical Yiddish tradition of anarchism and anti-Zionism, and trying to highlight Yiddish’s history as a radical form.
Would you say that your work has always been skeptical of or challenged Zionism?
I think it's a big part of Yiddish. Yiddish was set up in opposition to Zionism, because Zionism was very anti-Yiddish. Zionism said Yiddish is the language of the past, Yiddish is the language of the Holocaust, there's no place for Yiddish in this version of Jewish unity that we're presenting with Zionism. Zionist organisations basically took Yiddish and Yiddish pronunciation out of Jewish day schools, especially in New York and Philadelphia, and people in Israel were beaten up in the street for speaking Yiddish. Yiddish was already anti-Zionist since the turn of the 20th century, because it was associated with the radical workers movement called the Bund which was established in 1897, the same year that the World Zionist Congress met for the first time. It was always very wrapped up in standing in solidarity with the workers. Then Zionism took it a step further by saying, “Actually, we don't like Yiddish.” So I think that practising Yiddish music and Yiddish culture is anti-Zionist at its heart, because you're uplifting a culture that Zionism basically wiped out. It was not part of the vision of what Jewish unity meant post-Holocaust. When you're practising Yiddish, you're standing up to the part of Zionism that says Yiddish doesn't have a place here. But I was already sort of anti-Zionist and anarchist and all these different things. So it's especially important and meaningful to me to seek out the radical elements of Yiddish.
How strong or prominent is Yiddish culture today? Does it feel like it’s dying out?
No. I mean, people have been saying that Yiddish is dying out since the Holocaust, but I think that more and more young people are seeking out Yiddish today. Yiddish probably has just under a million speakers worldwide. That includes Haredi speakers, so ultra-religious speakers of the language. It also includes Yiddishists, people who have made it their life’s purpose to study and learn the language, and it includes radical secular Yiddish culture, so people who grew up in the Yiddish labor movement. We're always practising outside of the Zionist hegemonic Judaism. There are a lot of large institutions that have kept that alive, like The Workers Circle and Camp Kinderland, that have supported Yiddish. So some people have been able to escape the attempted wiping out of Yiddish entirely, either because they're super-insulated by a religious community, or because they were insulated by these amazing Yiddish labor organisations. There's a whole wave of really young, often very queer, Yiddishists who are coming to the language because something about hegemonic Jewish culture doesn't work for them. Whether that be Zionism, or whether that be strains of homophobia or whatever it is, their community is not working for them. So they're coming to Yiddish, to the language of their grandparents, who were Eastern European Jews. But there are so many other languages that were also Jewish languages; Judeo, Arabic dialects and Ladino, which is sort of Judeo Spanish. They were also wiped out by Zionism. So Yiddish is one particular face of that story.
I know you can't speak for the whole community, but within your circles, what has it been like in a post October 7 environment?
As a Jewish person, I was already really, really hyper attuned to Israel's war crimes pre October 7. So my whole life, this has been sort of a thing. I wasn’t born at the time but I think for many people, the Lebanon War was a big eye opener. This has been the primary subject of my work since long before October 7. I can speak a little more to what it's been like as an artist post October 7. Trying to make art in a world where you're watching a genocide in real time is unimaginable, and to experience it in the techno world and see Palestinian friends and colleagues just witnessing their own genocide has been really heartbreaking and horrible. But I think the techno community has really come together. I've been really involved with DJs Against Apartheid and Palestine Forever and Ravers for Palestine. There was activism happening in 2018 but in the techno world, I've just seen this boom of people getting involved in Palestine post October 7, which has been really meaningful.
The Yiddish world has also come together in support of Palestinian liberation, in lots of ways. The thing that I felt post October 7 is that all of a sudden, my non-Jewish and non-Arab friends were becoming really, really knowledgeable about this occupation, and I’ve been feeling a lot more community from my non-Jewish and non-Arab friends with regards to this issue. I think that people are just getting more and more educated, and now all of a sudden, it feels like the whole world cares about this issue, this thing that I've cared about my whole life. I also think more and more people are coming to Yiddish because I think for some, the genocide that followed October 7 was the eye-opening moment for people to abandon their Zionist institutions.
Have there been any sort of schisms in your community in the past year?
I mean, obviously we're all mourning October 7 as well. Whether or not you think that the Jewish state should exist and whether or not you're a Zionist, the violence that Jewish people experience and that Jewish people commit is something we’re always mourning. Zionism has a majority in the Jewish world. So as someone operating in the Jewish world, I come into contact with a lot of Zionists and I grew up with and know a lot of Israelis. I’m so much deeper in that world than I would be if I wasn't working in the Jewish world, even as an anti-Zionist. I've had some hard conversations. I haven't necessarily had any different conversations than I had before October 7, I just think the conversations are now much more urgent because of the genocide. Everything is happening so quickly. I never thought that the occupation of the West Bank was going to happen this quickly. It just feels like a ticking time bomb. Every minute that a Zionist institution continues to exist, we lose more people.
I know you had a Ravers for Palestine show in London last night, and I think you have a few shows in New York next week?
Something that I’ve loved about organising these parties is that they involve many different kinds of Yiddish radical underworld club practices. So it's come to involve a lot of drag people and burlesque people and puppeteers and dancers, and this event last night was organised with a lot of London drag kings, like Luca Evans, who goes by their drag name, Sir Cum Sized, They were the focal point of this event with a lot of people that they know from the drag world. And then I DJ’d, and an organisation called Queer House Party DJ’d, and it's all in support of the Ravers for Palestine strike fund and The Lad Fund strike fund, which we're seeing doing amazing things, like the Berghain boycott. There was just a piece in The Guardian about it. They’re doing really powerful things that have really intense policy impact, which for me, thinking about lives on the ground, feels really important.
I'm really excited about next week because a close collaborator from Vienna, Seba Kayan, is coming out to New York for a whole week of events. She's Viennese/Kurdish and she makes techno music with samples from the Kurdish and SWANA diaspora, and she's amazing, The headline event of her whole trip here is this event at Jupiter Disco on September 13, which is also kind of unofficially my release party for the single about my grandmother's childhood in Brooklyn. The whole visit is funded by the lower Manhattan Cultural Council, allowing us to basically do cross-cultural techno parties. So we did a couple with Palestine Forever. And then now we have Seba’s event, and she does Kurdish and SWANA sampling. Elina Arbo does Assyrian and Iraqi sampling; BINT does Egyptian-influenced drone music. Omar Ahmad also samples from SWANA, but he's Palestinian, and he does a lot of Palestinian Liberation focussed sets. And Dynoman is from Karachi, and is so deeply involved in the scene there, and does a lot of South Asian influenced sampling. It’s the event that I've been most excited about out of any event that I've ever done, because these are all DJs that I'm such a fan of, and I think it shows so well what radical sampling can do for diaspora.
Do you have many influences or artists you admire from the more traditional techno scene?
I’m influenced by people who are in the IDM world or the field recording world. Sonically, I just find it amazing. I really love Upsammy. I love Blawan. Sofia Kourtesis is more house, and the single I'm releasing is more housey. A lot of the stuff that I produce on my own when I'm not teaching is from the house world. But Sofia is amazing because she uses archival samples from Peruvian music and she has beautiful stories about all of her different drums. I got to meet her a few years ago, and she was really what inspired me to keep going with this music. I think of our conversation every time I sit down to produce, because she's such a detailed archivist. I really admire her archival work. I also really admire Omar Ahmad, his production and his work. The IDM flavour feels important to me just because sonically, it's what I enjoy.
And what about when you're DJing?
I love music that’s sonically delicious. I usually DJ techno tracks with Yiddish samples on top. I like Two Shell. A big influence on my work is Octo Octa and Eris Drew. They're amazing, and they have such a juicy relationship to sound and I watch all their videos online and I DJ their stuff a lot. I'm obsessed with them. Celia Hollander and Photay are also IDM people whose work I admire. Another DJ that I love who is also starting to do Yiddish stuff is Malzoff. They're an amazing Pittsburgh DJ who also has an amazing and delicious relationship to sound and their mixes really guide the narrative of my mixes. I was really sad to miss Honcho, which Malzof did all these installations for. It looked amazing. It’s always been on a weekend where I can’t make it but I definitely want to go to Honcho next year.