Black Ox Orkestar

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Montreal, Canada (2000 – present)

Black Ox Orkestar began in the summer of 2000, the project of four Montreal, Canada 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 , , or , creating not so much a of old and new as a way to tear the old sounds from the past and make them resonate in the present. The band tries to be true to the strangeness and beauty of these archaic songs, translating them into new forms, and writing new material that continues an imaginary tradition still humming in their ears.

On Yiddish

The Yiddish language has always been at the center of the project. A unique mixture of German, Hebrew, and Slavic elements, it was the everyday speech of Eastern European Jews for centuries. The voice of the Jewish political and artistic radicalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries was uttered in Yiddish. Suffragettes, sweatshop activists, anarchists and modernist poets all participated in a global, cosmopolitan culture that followed the exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe. This flowering of modern Yiddish was cut short by the Shoah and by the emergence of the state of Israel, which enshrined Hebrew as a national Jewish language.
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Top Albums

  • Nisht Azoy
    Black Ox Orkestar Play
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  • Ver Tanzt?
    Black Ox Orkestar Play
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  • Ver Tanzt
    Black Ox Orkestar
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  • Ignorez

    nice post-rock................................................................................................................

    25 days ago

  • tsintskaro

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of healthy discussion, in fact it should be encouraged. That is unless you actually enjoy reading soundbites like "overrated", "underrated", "post-gaze", "sooooo good" or "hipster blah" ad infinitum.

    January 2012

  • raquelaquer

    give up the fight about tags and listen to the music, freaks! :) [2]

    October 2011

  • myrkkyhammas

    yes. for those of you who don't know: this band does not make klezmer. it's hipster-friendly kind-of-yiddish indie folk blah.

    August 2011

  • NINlife

    This would be strange to have sex to

    July 2011

  • blindsunden

    Black Ox Orkestar are one of my favorite bands, but I can't stress clearly enough that this is NOT Klezmer. Klezmer consits mostly of dance songs and lively instrumental pieces for weddings and other celebrations. The bands music is also close to a lot of traditional Cretan folk music by "sound", but they predominantly play European Jewish folk.

    July 2011

  • joseies

    Wow, it's so fuckin' amazing

    May 2011

  • velveteer27

    Very different kind of Klezmer. Would love some recommendations. All I could find was very cheery stuff, nothing as dark and bleak as this. Would love some more stuff like this.

    May 2011
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