Golem

A BIOGRAPHY OF GOLEM

Contrary to popular belief, Golem is neither a towering Jewish Frankenstein who defended the Jews of 17th Century Prague, nor a creature from “Lord of the Rings.”

Golem is a 6 piece Eastern European folk-punk band.

Fronted by Annette Ezekiel - singer, accordionist, and 5-foot powerhouse, with vocalist, tambourine player, crazy-man Aaron Diskin, violin virtuoso Alicia Jo Rabins, trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, upright bassist Taylor Bergren-Chrisman, and drummer Tim Monaghan, Golem’s sound evokes wisps of old-world elegance filtered through the successes and disappointments of new-world dreams. Spending nights in Lower East Side immigrant-owned bagel shops and summers in Eastern Europe, Annette collects Jewish, Gypsy, and Slavic folk songs, adding, editing, and rearranging them along the way. These are the songs to which her Eastern European grandparents danced over a century ago, and now Golem has its unwrinkled fans moshing to the same pulsing beats.

At Annette's bat mitzvah, friends and relatives told her mother she should be an opera singer or a cantor, but Annette's relationship with traditional Judaism ended there. She went on to join the punk crowd, dyed her hair blue, wore nothing but black, and trained as a classical pianist, like her grandmother (rebellious, we know). While training simultaneously as a professional ballerina (like her mother), Annette spent summers with her family in the famously Jewish Catskill Mountains. When, at the age of 12, she insisted that she not miss ballet class during the summer months, Annette's mother shipped her off to a nearby Ukrainian resort (as in the Old Country, Jews and Slavs still live side by side in the Borsht Belt) which happened to have a dance program. Thrown into a Ukrainian folk dance, Annette picked up the steps immediately and, in traditional Slavic costumes, was soon dancing lead roles and teaching the classes herself. She was forever smitten with the rhythms and melodies of Eastern Europe, which she often heard there, on accordion. The sound of the squeezebox gave her chills, and years later Annette bought her own (a red "Main Squeeze" with rhinestones) and started learning to play folk songs by ear. Too short to make the big-time as a ballet dancer, Annette discovered she had a gift for languages: she could understand Ukrainian from her dancing days and picked up French, Italian, and Russian along the way. When she hit Yiddish (a mix of German, Hebrew and Slavic, and the language of Eastern European Jews), Annette's many interests suddenly collided. She had been listening to her grandparents' Klezmer records since she was a kid and could feel the music’s Slavic dance beats in her feet. It was soon after this that Annette conceived of the band GOLEM – a monster stumbling through Jewish music – shaking things up yet remaining true to the tradition.

In addition to national tours and dates opening for Matisyahu and the Dresden Dolls, the band has also revived an obscure Catskills Mountains tradition and presented a unique club show: “Golem Gets Married,” a performance piece in which the band holds a mock-Jewish wedding complete with (faux) rabbi and cantor, wedding cake, bride and groom in drag, followed by a wild, wild party. The Knitting Factory premiere received rave reviews in the New York Times, and the band plans to take “Golem Gets Married” on the road later this year. After self-releasing 2004’s Homesick Songs, Golem has paired with not-for-profit label JDub Records (Matisyahu, Balkan Beat Box) and producer Emery Dobyns (Patti Smith, Antony & the Johnsons, Battles, Mobius Band….) for their latest release, Fresh Off Boat (a reference to new immigrants who call each other F.O.B.s). The album was released in August of 2006 and features The Dresden Doll’s Amanda Palmer, Phish bassist Mike Gordon, and legendary Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye. Unrequited love stories? Check. Drunken dances? Check. Warnings to future sons-in-law? Check. Dysfunctional families forcing kids to sell bagels on the street? Fresh Off Boat has ‘em all. And they may be in Yiddish (or Russian or French), but when Golem wails that the rent is too high, everybody understands.