10/20/2022
It truly warms our hearts to announce that Black Ox Orkestar are back together after a 15-year hiatus and have made a remarkable new album: Everything Returns comes out Friday 02 December on all formats including lovely deluxe vinyl and CD editions—which you can preorder now.
The band is sharing a first song (and video) that will already be familiar to some fans: "Mizrakh Mi Ma'arav" first appeared on a flexi 7" issued by Jewish Currents magazine earlier this year as a gift to subscribers.
For those unfamiliar: Black Ox Orkestar began playing in summer 2000. Thierry Amar (GY!BE, Silver Mt. Zion), Scott Gilmore (SMZ), Gabriel Levine (Sackville), and Jessica Moss (SMZ) came from post-punk, out-rock, avant-folk and improv in the febrile late-90s Montréal DIY scene. Scott was also diving deep into Yiddish, and all four wanted to explore their Jewish roots and diasporic influences in a purposive musical project. They would gather to listen to recordings of Klezmer and other East European, North African and Balkan musics. This was still relatively early internet—the band's channeling of Jewish diasporic music, while not without signposts and roadmaps, was a mostly cloistered and singular stylistic journey, yielding two stunning albums: Ver Tanzt? (2004) and Nisht Azoy (2006). Klezmer-adjacent, mixing non-purist interpretations of traditional instrumentals with originals sung in Yiddish, Black Ox forged a sound all their own, informed by indie rock and jazz sensibilities, combining rawness and spacious atmosphere, meditative warmth and emotive, politically-charged spittle and grit.
Everything Returns picks up right where the band left off a decade-and-a-half ago: a simmering and sublime song cycle that once again juxtaposes instrumentals and vocal-driven originals forged primarily from piano, acoustic guitar, clarinet, violin, upright bass and cimbalom (along with some special guests on percussion and brass here and there). The band returns to themes of displacement, oppression, ethno-nationalist fascism, homelessness, historical trauma, internationalism and solidarity—through the lens of what another 15 years has wrought and brought, to the group members individually, and to our collective cultural and political experience. A true and distinctive diaspora music through and through: a haunting, richly textured, darkly sparkling album at once from a vanished world and very much of our time and place.
Link below. Thanks for listening.
https://smarturl.it/9iqt30