FEAST: an Eat | Punch fusion on vinyl

(2024, ! a N G R r ! )

A vinyl “Feast” of songs from from the heady days of “Eat” and “Punch” when Charming Hostess was a rock band that blended eerie harmonies, complex rhythms, and a playfulness about gender. Charming Hostess draws on women's vocal traditions (primarily from Eastern Europe and North Africa), and integrates them with American folk forms both white and black. A hoedown where bodacious babes belt the blues in Bulgarian while a punk-klezmer band rocks out in accompaniment. The genre of this incarnation of ChoHo is KLEZMER-PUNK/BALKAN-FUNK. Bits of "Eat" (Vaccination, 1998) washed down with some "Punch" (ReR, 2005).

THE GINZBURG GEOGRAPHY

(2022, Tzadik)

What sustains people in severely oppressive situations? How do you fight back when there seems to be no way to fight back? The Ginzburg Geography is based on the life and work of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg, Italian Jews famous for anti-fascist activism and intellectual brilliance. Soon after their marriage, they were sent into exile in remote Abruzzo, continuing to work clandestinely. When the Germans invaded Italy, the Ginzburgs went to Rome to continue their work. In 1944, Leone was captured, taken to prison and tortured to death by the Nazis. Jewlia sets the Ginzburgs’ writings, both public and private, to music.

The Ginzburg Geography approaches weighty subjects with raucous exuberance, exalting the human spirit not in spite of but as a counterbalance to the forces of hate, a vivacious light shining through oppressive darkness. Her sonic palette honors the Italian regional traditions of Turin, Abruzzo and Rome. She drew from Italian Jewish liturgy, which itself reflects and refracts the Christian sacred traditions surrounding it. She drew from Italian anti-fascist songs–work chants and resistance anthems. Jewish, Italian and American folk traditions, contemporary classical and radical punk – all dance and sing together with a communal spirit in Eisenberg’s music.

BOOK OF J

(2018, 3rd Generation Recordings)

Book of J is Jewlia Eisenberg and Jeremiah Lockwood, engaging in new psalmody, drawing from the rich Biblical commentary of Black and White American traditional music, Yiddish songs of ghosts and police violence, and piyyutim (paraliturgical songs) with a queer bent.

Bowls Zine. This music CD and installation project was accompanined by an original, 16pg Zine, by Liza Frolkis. $3

The Bowls Project

(2010, Tzadik | Radical Jewish Culture)
(Yerba Buena Center for Arts, San Francisco | Museum of Peace, Samarkand, Uzbekistan)

Based on Aramaic inscriptions from Babylonian Jewish amulets known as “demon bowls,” The Bowls Project sings of mysticism and magic, angels and demons, and the trials and joys of love and sex. Especially audible are the voices of Talmudic-era women: their work, hopes and dreams. Weaving together Babylonian devotional songs, apocalyptic American folk music and a radical take on ritual power. Jewlia’s compositions weave together these amulet texts with Babylonian devotional songs, apocalyptic American folk music, and a radical take on spiritual power. 

The Bowls Project album was released simultaneously with The Bowls Project: Secrets of the Apocalyptic Intimate, at Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco, an interactive sound sculpture/immersive performance installation/international collaboration created by Charming Hostess with videographer Shezad Dawood and architect Michael Ramage. An ecstatic investigation into sex, magic and secrets of the home, The Bowls Project takes place within a stunning masterwork of ancient-meets-modern design: a towering double vaulted masonry dome by celebrated architect Michael Ramage. The project won a 2011 SEAONC Excellence in Engineering Award and was presented in Samarkand, Uzbekistan as part of a CEC Artslink International Fellowship.

SARAJEVO BLUES

(2010, Tzadik | Radical Jewish Culture)

Text by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic scored for voices, beatbox, and string trio. Juxtaposing music and text from the Jewish, African, and Bosnian diasporas. Charming Hostess sings of genocide and nationalism, freedom under siege, the nature of evil, and resisting war by any means necessary. Incorporating Jewish, Balkan and Sufi musical influences, Jewlia's boldly original compositional voice weds the sexy, soulful sound of 60's girl groups to the ambition and scope of 21st century classical music.

“Watching or even reading the news, one becomes complicit in a kind of war-profiteering – the experience of suffering people is appropriated and used to sell cars. Tied to the marketing of misery is the problem of how real loss and horror is co-opted by various ideologies to make people frightened and malleable. In SARAJEVO BLUES, we steered away from news and toward poetry as a way to focus on real human experience, on particularity and wholeness.” —Jewlia