Britney Spears and Beethoven collide in dark and beautiful whimsy today in the hands of Sydney klezmer punk collective CHUTNEY. Teaming up with The Potbelleez vocalist Ilan Kidron on guest vocals to conjure Toxic Moonlight, the hypnotic melodics of Britney Spears’ 2003 hit Toxic fuse with Beethoven’s melancholic masterpiece Moonlight Sonata alongside CHUTNEY’s trademark Eastern European and Middle Eastern flair. Or, as CHUTNEY themselves put it: “It’s the illicit love child of Britney and Beethoven in a raucous Balkan bar – it’s bonkers”. So lets learn more about them with a Quick Q+A
Hi, thanks for taking the time to chat with Hear 2 Zen, what have you been up to today?
A pleasure! Most of my day has been spent writing responses to Q&As like this one. I’m flattered by the attention 😉
Tell us about yourself, how long have you been performing/creating music for?
I’m CHUTNEY’s violinist, I’ve been playing since I was five and composing since shortly after that. I studied violin at the Sydney Conservatorium after school and played with the Australian Chamber Orchestra for a few years before starting what became CHUTNEY in 2019.
Who are your greatest inspirations? Why?
Anyone with vision, passion and integrity, be they athletes, journalists, commentators, musicians. I’m most inspired by artists who have believed in themselves and made music authentically, even when there was zero evidence of a commercially viable market. An ‘inside out’ approach, where the artist digs deep and extracts something novel and honest; the opposite of an ‘outside in’ approach, where the artist does ‘what they’re told’ and, chameleon-like, mirrors contemporary trends for the sake of passing popularity.
The Cat Empire strike us as big adherents of this approach, and we take a lot of inspiration from them.
How do you create music? Are you lyrics/story driven, or does the music/melody come first? Explain your process.
My creative process is as varied as the music I create. The lyrics and melody for my first song, Rivers of Gold, came all together – I kinda exhaled them, line by line, as I cycled to and from my dad’s birthday lunch back in 2020. Even then, the A section came more easily than the B section (I reckon I was hungrier on the way there).
For other songs, especially some of our crazy covers, I’ll start with the seed of an idea – say “wouldn’t it be cool to make a klezmerified mashup of Britney and Beethoven?” – and then just unleash my imagination. I have noticed that, across the board, some of my strongest musical ideas (like transplanting the bassline of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata onto the ‘Toxic’ verse) come while I’m doing something menial, like cleaning or commuting.
Story-telling is paramount for me, even with instrumental tunes like Cantina. I always aim for a compelling narrative trajectory, and that affects my writing, consciously and probably subconsciously too.
For all my music, I’ve usually consolidated the overall form in my head before I start writing it down. I sketch out the skeleton and then flesh out the details (transitions, horn lines). We try it in rehearsal, the song evolves as the band sinks their teeth into it, and continues to develop from performance to performance – all the way into and including the recording studio!
What has been your greatest challenge so far in performing/creating music?
Just convincing people to listen to us! I am my own harshest critic, and I can now comfortably say that CHUTNEY is world class. Our debut album Ajar is varied and polished as hell, and our live shows are electrifying – we go nuts on stage. Everyone who hears us loves us.
However, perhaps because we’re a world music(ish) ensemble that defies easy genre categorisation, and we’re largely instrumentally led, and we don’t have a rhythm guitar (?) – just getting people to have a taste of CHUTNEY has been our biggest challenge.
Tell us about your new release Toxic, how did it come about?
CHUTNEY is a klezmer band with a twist: apart from quirky originals and funked up takes on traditional Eastern European Jewish dance tunes, we’ve also developed a tendency to reimagine pop bangers through the lens of klezmer.
We had a gig with guest singer Ilan Kidron (The Potbelleez frontman) in 2021 and were chatting about what crazy new tunes we could add to our set list. Ilan mentioned that the string riff in ‘Toxic’ sounds “really klezmer” – that was all I needed to klezmer-ify Britney’s 2003 hit. (Turns out that riff is actually a Bollywood sample – but we didn’t let the truth ruin a good idea!)
Something about the song’s dark (toxic) romance led me to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, especially after I realised that stealing Beethoven’s descending bassline allowed us to do something completely different in the otherwise harmonically static ‘Toxic’ verses. I sketched up a chart and we tweaked it in rehearsal, at the gig and in the studio into its present form.
What advice do you have to artists who are just starting out?
Honestly, the best piece of advice I can extract from CHUTNEY’s success so far is cliched, but no less true: be true to yourself. Back yourself, believe that you have something of value to share with the world, and pour your energy into creating exactly that. People can sense authenticity, and they crave it.
Tell us your favourite Zen practice.
I meditate – not regularly enough, but I always feel clearer and calmer when I do. I also have a daily yoga-come-pilates-come-floor ballet stretching routine that does wonders for my hips and CNS 🙂
