Strange Tongue - Mistame Loshn is a prescient and much needed channel into a lyrical and defiant tradition of Yiddish song - a tradition of prophets and widows, queer revelers and insurgent poets. Temple creates fresh, urgent reworkings of poems and melodies from a fractured archive of this tradition by digging deeply into the grief, celebrations and unexpected connections amongst a variety of rich community traditions they are immersed in. Ultimately the album aims to heal some pain from displacement and cultural loss, while bringing forward Temple’s complex experience as a trans musician.
Temple has been a fixture of New York’s activist, theater and Jewish music scenes for more than a decade. This album reflects their work in many settings and idioms, from riot girl truth-telling to explorations of Transylvanian fiddle music to working with elders in Chassidic Brooklyn.
Temple’s debut solo album is presented in Yiddish and English (and a sprinkling of Aramaic), simultaneously telling full stories in English while offering an invitation to engage with the richness of the Yiddish texts. It asks - what do these languages and cultures give and take from one another? In Temple’s sly translation work, a sentiment that has difficulty moving between languages often becomes an occasion to tell an entirely new type of story.
Temple writes “I had a hard time understanding the world around me as a kid, and a harder time imagining myself as becoming anyone at all. But when in young adulthood I started hearing and understanding Yiddish - it was like the well was unsealed - the water flowed. I saw who else was drinking from the well, and how they flourished. Beautiful melodies…a civilization…the way to hold a spoon…I was on a little island in Denver, Colorado and I was missing the inroads to my own civilization. I was displaced. I was lost actually, and I was without a map. This album was born from my longing, wanting and wishing.”
The songs here move between melancholy and despair as they consider the threatening mechanisms of violent power structures (“Fayer - Fire,” and “Yidn Shmidn - the Blacksmith”), to an invocation and invitation to ancestors (“Ushpizn - Guests”) to a spirited debate with them (“Vikhtik - What’s Important”), to Temple’s reworking of “Hot Zikh Mir Di Zip Tsezipt,” of which pioneering ethnomusicologist Ruth Rubin said “this song is half nonsense and half wit, but the melody is gay - absolutely.” Ruth and Pete Seeger recorded their own version of this song, while Temple turns it into a call for queer celebration.
Recorded in Brooklyn with several former members of Temple’s former rad-trad ensemble Tsibele - Zoë Aqua (violin), Zoë Guigueno (bass) and Eléonore Weill (vox), and featuring drummer David Licht (The Klezmatics, Bongwater) on drums and Philadelphia-based composer/improviser Daniel Blacksberg on trombone. Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics vocal produced the album and also appears on two tracks.