Black Ox Orkestar are back with a new album Everything Returns (2 December 2022 via Constellation – pre-order) and single Mizrakh Mi Ma’arav. Before we dive in, I think it’s worth setting out a little bit of history around the band, Yiddish culture and Klezmer music.
One of my favourite albums in the early years of Folk Radio was Nisht Azoy (released in 2006) by the unforgettable Black Ox Orkestar. The band features Thierry Amar (contrabass), Scott Levine Gilmore (vocals, cymbalom, guitar, mandolin, saz, violin & percussion), Gabriel Levine (clarinet, guitar) and Jessica Moss (violin).
At the time, I was enjoying more Eastern European music, from Klezmer to Balkan brass bands but I was only just becoming aware of the music that had travelled across from Eastern Europe to the US in the early 1900s. It was these early recordings that would influence Black Ox Orkestar, and luckily, they were made on good old shellac whose incredible preservational properties allow us still to enjoy some of those pre-war recordings today. Many of these have been brought to the public attention by collectors such as Ian Nagoski (To What Strange Place) whose Canary Records label is something of a goldmine for pre-war recordings from Eastern Europe and the American diaspora (https://canary-records.bandcamp.com/). These recordings presented a whole new history of American folk roots which had not been heard before by many. In an early video interview (by Brainwashed.com), the band described how this Yiddish culture died out due to 20th Century politics…factors included the rise of Nationalism and Fascism in Europe as well as assimilation and a shame about ethnicity in North America.
The band’s bio on Constellation Records opens: ‘Black Ox Orkestar began in the summer of 2000, the project of four Montreal musicians exploring their common Jewish heritage for sounds that could speak to them today. Listening to pre-war recordings of Jewish and non-Jewish music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, they wanted to capture the rawness and emotional intensity they heard there. They also threw their own musical histories into the mix, their years of playing out-jazz, punk rock, or weird folk, creating not so much a fusion of old and new as a way to tear the old sounds from the past and make them resonate in the present. The band tried to be true to the strangeness and beauty of these archaic songs, translating them into new forms, and writing new material that continued an imaginary tradition still humming in their ears. They played their final show in 2005.’
In the same year of Nisht Azoy (2006), Beirut released their hugely popular Gulag Orkestar, which featured American folk duo A Hawk and a Hacksaw‘s Jeremy Barnes (drummer of Neutral Milk Hotel) and Heather Trost, whose influences can be clearly heard. Barnes and Trost were heavily influenced by Eastern European, Turkish and Balkan traditions; this was more in evidence on their second album, Darkness at Noon (2005).
Like the music of Hawk and a Hacksaw, Nisht Azoy felt rooted in a rich tradition but also undiluted and raw and sat well alongside the more leftfield indie-rock and the burgeoning weird folk offerings of the time that actively invited experimentation. The band was formed from Montréal’s fertile post-punk scene of the early 2000s, featuring members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Sackville.
Besides Misht Azoy, they only released one other album, Ver Tanzt?, their 2004 debut. Now, after 15 years, they are back with a new album ‘Everything Returns‘, out on 2 December 2022 via Constellation (CST169). The new album manages to shrink those intervening years as it picks up right where the band left off, with incisively atmospheric, uniquely modern Jewish diasporic folk music of brooding balladry filtered through the lens of an indie-rock sensibility, exquisitely recorded by Greg Norman (Nina Nastasia, Jason Molina).
Today they are releasing their lead single, “Mizrakh Mi Ma’arav“, and it’s accompanied by a video directed by Erik Ruin, a Michigan-raised, Philadelphia-based printmaker, shadow puppeteer, paper-cut artist who has been praised by the New York Times for his “spell-binding cut-paper animations.” The band’s resurrection was first revealed in February 2022 with a surprise flexi 7” single issued by leftist magazine Jewish Currents as a gift to its thousands of subscribers.
“A vivid, overwhelming sound that transports the listener not into the past, but to an alternate present, one where the wails and thrums of Jewish music around the world—especially the Ashkenazi genre known as klezmer—were never stifled. “Mizrakh Mi Ma’arav” (“East From West”) tells a story that will only become more universal in the days to come. Interspersing predominately Yiddish lyrics with words in Arabic, English, Hebrew, and German, the band evokes refugee flows of past, present and future. Lamentation, rage, and hope swirl together as the song reminds us that “settlement” is a dangerous illusion. The destination cannot be where meaning lies, for we may never reach it.”
Jewish Currents
One of the things I greatly admire about Black Ox Orkestar is their activism, which also crosses over into the work of Erik Ruin. Band members Gabriel Levine and Scott Levine Gilmore co-founded the Le Petit Théâtre de l’Absolu (2001-2005), described as an activist puppet theatre. Among their works, in 2003, they toured a children’s show, The Rooster and the King, through Israel and the occupied West Bank, performing in schools, community centres, and refugee camps.
Erik Ruin is no stranger to activism either – a founding member of the international Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative,and co-author of the book Paths Toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (w/ Cindy Milstein, PM Press, 2012). Talking about Mizrakh Mi Ma’arav he said:
“When I first heard the lyrics of “Mizrakh Mi Ma’arav” and its themes of forced displacement, longing for a lost and/or imaginary homeland, and border-crossing, my mind immediately turned to those close to me directly impacted by/intertwined within those things. At the heart of this video are four friends, framed by projections that represent both their individual and family narratives of migration. The whole video was filmed within 5 blocks of my home here in beloved West Philadelphia, a diverse area constantly threatened by encroaching gentrification as new luxury developments spring up along its borders. Other images, of the ebb and flow of routes and systems, are projected on sites I pass every day, that maintain some trace of my neighbors—whether that’s the boarded up aftermath of a house fire or the torn remnants of a poster protesting climate change.“
Talking about the collaboration with Erik, Black Ox Orkestar said:
“We’d long followed Erik’s work as a printmaker and co-founder of the Justseeds collective. His expressionistic and obsessively handmade aesthetic always seemed like it could be part of the Black Ox world. After viewing his animation experiments, and especially his recent book Threnody for the Dispossessed, we knew he’d be the perfect illustrator for this song about migration, longing and exile.“
Erik Ruin expands on the video: “Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez is filmed alongside cross-fading portraits of her Puerto Rican and Persian family members, the majority of whom she’s never met, separated by familial, financial and governmental barriers.
“Mee Hae Kim is framed by the only known image taken with her South Korean foster mother before she was shipped to the US for adoption due to forces such as war, poverty and colonialism.
“Julius Masri stands amid depictions of the Lebanese Civil War his family fled. Egina Manachova poses with her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt as they are crisscrossed by the shifting borderlines of Eastern Europe.
“The whole video was filmed within 5 blocks of my home here in beloved West Philadelphia, a diverse area constantly threatened by encroaching gentrification as new luxury developments spring up along its borders. Other images, of the ebb and flow of routes and systems, are projected on sites I pass every day, that maintain some trace of my neighbors- whether that’s the boarded-up aftermath of a house fire or the torn remnants of a poster protesting climate change.
“Many thanks to Christopher McDonald, who filmed the outdoor projection sequences, provided invaluable technical advice and encouragement, and generously lent me equipment- and to Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist for letting me use their home for the portrait shoots.”
BLACK OX ORKESTAR LIVE DATES • DECEMBER 2022
12/13 • Toronto ON • The Music Gallery
12/14 • Montréal QC • Museum of Jewish Montréal
Co-presented with MJM, POP Montréal and KlezKanada
12/15 • Keene NH • Nova Arts
12/16 • Brooklyn NY • Union Pool
12/17 • Brooklyn NY • Union Pool
Co-presented with Jewish Currents Magazine
Everything Returns (180gLP / CD / DL) is released on 2 December 2022 via Constellation (CST169)