Socalled / Kaiser Quartett

Canadian musician, composer, photographer and magician Josh »Socalled« Dolgin is to the International Summer Festival what the sun is to the month of August: He thrilled multigenerational audiences with his two THE SEASON anarcho-puppet-musicals, and as a musician he has whipped the Festival’s garden into dance. To help you cope with the wait for the third part of the SEASON musicals (2019!), this year we are presenting a Yiddish song evening with Socalled and the Hamburg Kaiser Quartett. In his work searching for the perfect loop as a hip-hop producer, Socalled has often drawn on his own Yiddish culture, haunted by extermination, assimilation and persecution. Instead of merely using the sounds from this forgotten world as samples, Josh Dolgin has assembled an impressive repertoire of his favorite Yiddish theater-, art- and klezmer songs from his record collection, and arranged them for string quartet with vocals. No machines, no beats, only haunting melodies, strange texts and crazy harmonies. Dolgin recorded these songs as an album in the fall of 2017, also with the Kaiser Quartett, which has not only played in both Socalled musicals, but has been Kampnagel’s regular quartet, including in productions by Chilly Gonzales, and was awarded the most recent HANS music prize. And anyone who has been sucked into Socalled’s stage vortex knows that on this evening the whole impact of Yiddish culture will enliven the Summer Festival.