As a teenager, Chaia was involved in the klezmer music scene in New York and also composed electronic beats on her own time.

“When I was 14, I joined a klezmer band led by Jeff Warschauer,” Chaia said. “I was exposed to archival Yiddish recordings.”

She had started making electronic music a couple of years before that, inspired by techno sounds from the radio that she had never heard in real life. “I felt very deeply the otherworldliness, the magic, the connection [between electronic and Yiddish music].”

Chaia found the language for combining the two genres as she began studying under Hankus Netsy, the founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band. “[Hankus] started sending me recordings from his personal library … and they were the most beautiful recordings I had ever heard,” Chaia said. 

At the same time as she was first exposed to those samples, she was also going to rave shows in Allston hosted by Clear The Floor, a Black and Indigenous rave collective. “I was learning about the Black American roots of electronic and rave music, and how rave music is traditional music,” she said. “It felt obvious to me that if I was going to practice electronic music, I had to practice it as traditional music. The traditional music that I knew was Yiddish music.”

Yiddish culture — and the localized, socialist movements that arose out of it — were pushed to the margins in favor of Hebrew and larger nationalist movements that gained traction after World War II. In a parallel manner, techno music represents the power of the underground to offer a space for Black cultural expression to thrive amidst marginalization. “[My album] is one way to say, ‘This is my culture. This is my music,’ and I’m offering it to black techno in solidarity. I’m putting it forward as a way to say that I believe in the same values as techno practitioners and as Black nightlife, and I want to support it.”

Many of the Yiddish songs that Chaia samples are unaccompanied by instrumentals, which makes it possible to blend them in over the rhythm of a steady beat.  “DeForrest Brown Jr. is my favorite theorist on techno, and he theorizes that the … steady kick pattern [of techno] provides space for Black cultural life and expression to breathe over because it’s so regular and it’s so steady,” Chaia said. “A Yiddish song that is otherwise unaccompanied is able to breathe in this drone of techno music. … The little phrasing, the little intonations are all so audible in the techno world.”