Rooted in Eastern European Jewish life, Yiddish music holds echoes of migration, memory, and revolution. In Facing Yiddishland, three bold artists push this tradition into new terrain. Lori Goldston, Chaia, and Levoneh reimagine the Yiddish song tradition through glitchy and psychedelic performance techniques.
Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston (Earth, Nirvana, Mirah) is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography.
Chaia is an electronic composer working at the intersection of Yiddish culture and electronic club music. She weaves archival Yiddish samples with techno and ambient frameworks, creating hybrid folkloric-electronic compositions that situate ancestral sound within global and liberatory rave ecologies. Her work has been featured at the NAMM Show, Pop Montreal, Shtetl Berlin, and beyond.
Levoneh is a collaborative music project led by composer and producer, Ross Kirshenbaum, based in Seattle, on unseeded Duwamish territory. Kirshenbaum grew up in the PNW, deeply influenced by the coalescence of gritty, ethereal, and moody music that evolved there. Levoneh reflects the absorption and digestion of these dichotomies, combining elements of electro-acoustic, psychedelic pop soundscapes with deeply vulnerable protest folk songs.