A new genre of music originating from Boston’s indie scene and conservatory institutions is taking root throughout nightclubs in the United States and abroad. These sounds are spearheaded by DJ Chaia, the creator of kleztronica, a style that blends traditional klezmer and Yiddish music with techno and house music.
As a teenager, Chaia was involved in the klezmer music scene in New York and also composed electronic beats on her own time.
“When I was 14, I joined a klezmer band led by Jeff Warschauer,” Chaia said. “I was exposed to archival Yiddish recordings.”
She had started making electronic music a couple of years before that, inspired by techno sounds from the radio that she had never heard in real life. “I felt very deeply the otherworldliness, the magic, the connection [between electronic and Yiddish music].”
Chaia found the language for combining the two genres as she began studying under Hankus Netsy, the founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band. “[Hankus] started sending me recordings from his personal library … and they were the most beautiful recordings I had ever heard,” Chaia said.
At the same time as she was first exposed to those samples, she was also going to rave shows in Allston hosted by Clear The Floor, a Black and Indigenous rave collective. “I was learning about the Black American roots of electronic and rave music, and how rave music is traditional music,” she said. “It felt obvious to me that if I was going to practice electronic music, I had to practice it as traditional music. The traditional music that I knew was Yiddish music.”
Yiddish culture — and the localized, socialist movements that arose out of it — were pushed to the margins in favor of Hebrew and larger nationalist movements that gained traction after World War II. In a parallel manner, techno music represents the power of the underground to offer a space for Black cultural expression to thrive amidst marginalization. “[My album] is one way to say, ‘This is my culture. This is my music,’ and I’m offering it to black techno in solidarity. I’m putting it forward as a way to say that I believe in the same values as techno practitioners and as Black nightlife, and I want to support it.”
Many of the Yiddish songs that Chaia samples are unaccompanied by instrumentals, which makes it possible to blend them in over the rhythm of a steady beat. “DeForrest Brown Jr. is my favorite theorist on techno, and he theorizes that the … steady kick pattern [of techno] provides space for Black cultural life and expression to breathe over because it’s so regular and it’s so steady,” Chaia said. “A Yiddish song that is otherwise unaccompanied is able to breathe in this drone of techno music. … The little phrasing, the little intonations are all so audible in the techno world.”
Chaia’s upcoming album, “Yiddish Electronic,” was co-produced with Adrian Chabla and will be released on May 31 at a release show at Public Records in New York. The album has seven samples of Yiddish archival songs over nine different tracks, featuring both living and past Yiddish singers in collaboration with a number of archives, including the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.
“The main thread [in the album] is collective responsibility to rootedness. We have the responsibility to acknowledge where we came from and to make that our own,” Chaia said. Local collectivity is a throughline in Yiddish music, such as in anti-state or anti-fascist sentiments that are expressed through lyrics. “I want people to come away from it feeling empowered to address the histories of their own communities and to make radical art that … throws away any attempt to co-opt culture for a nationalist or statist or a violent purpose,” she said.
The two released singles from the album, “Borough Park” and “A Naye Geshikhte,” show Chaia’s intimate attention to both her own familial history and the broader communal and spiritual themes that the Yiddish songs sampled express. “Borough Park” begins with a recording of Chaia’s grandmother talking about her experience growing up in Borough Park in Brooklyn, after which The Pennywhistlers’ “Oifn Oivn” gets woven into a house beat. “A Naye Geshikhte,” Chaia’s second single, originally sung by Lifshe Schaechter-Widman in 1954, and is a ballad about a drowned youth and the mourning prayer that is said for him as his clothes are distributed to the poor.
“I really fell in love with the parts of the song ... that were about collective mourning,” Chaia said. “The song ends with the phrase, ‘Give your clothes to someone, to a poor person, so that they can also say Kaddish,’ say the mourning prayer. For me, [what] was so meaningful is that mourning itself is an act that was dignified.”
Chaia’s third single from the album, “Daloy Politsey,” will be released on Thursday in collaboration with the International Jewish Labor Bund organization, a revival of the original Jewish Labor Bund from the 1800s. “Daloy Politsey” is a historic anti-authoritarian protest song amongst socialist and anarchist Jews, literally translating to “down with the police” in English. “I combine [the song] with my form of religious and spiritual anarchism that there should be no rulers, except for a divine power. There should be no police,” Chaia said.
Though it’s easy to think of “Yiddish Electronic” as a revival of historical culture, Chaia views her work more as opening up another side of Yiddish that has never died out. She ends the album with the song “Di Zun Vet Aruntyergeyn,” Theodore Bikel and Shura Lipovsky’s version of a folk song. The song is often interpreted as a farewell or lullaby, though Chaia interprets it differently in her album, instead seeing it as a way to embrace the marginalization that Yiddish has faced and an opportunity for it to shine in underground nightlife.
“We are using it as a way to speak from … the power of the underground, to speak in solidarity and to create something magical and beautiful,” Chaia said.
