Featuring guest vocals from Potbelleez own Ilan Kidron in an outstanding cover of Brittany Spears’ Toxic, CHUTNEY have infused insane Beethoven instrumentation with Cat Empire energy. They have absolutely blown it out of the park!
Tell us about your new single Toxic?
‘Toxic Moonlight’is what you’d get if Britney Spears and Beethoven had an illicit love child and you found them partying in a Balkan bar. It’s a bonkers mashup of Britney’s 2003 banger and Beethoven’s iconic ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, reimagined through the lens of the Balkan/Romanian/Jewish hora dance, with a generous dollop of darkly dystopian stadium rock.
The track features Ilan Kidron on guest vocals in an intoxicating rollercoaster of pure charisma.
What’s the creative process like for you?
Free and wild! I identify the seed of an idea – say “what would happen if I made a klezmerified mashup of Britney and Beethoven?” – and then I just unleash my imagination. Sometimes my strongest ideas (like transplanting the bassline of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata onto the ‘Toxic’ verse) come while I’m commuting or cleaning.
Regardless, I’ve usually consolidated the overall form of a song 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!
If you could change something about the music industry what would change?
I would love for klezmer and klezmer fusion to be more widely known and appreciated. Literally everyone loves our music once they hear it – we just have to convince them to press play. We’re hoping that ‘Toxic Moonlight’ will prove an effective gateway drug 🙂
What do you think life would be like for you if you didn’t have music/visual art as an outlet?
Much quieter! There’s music in my head most of the time.
I’d probably become an ultramarathon runner, to flee the hideous dystopia of a stale, grey, musicless existence…
Is there anyone you would like to collaborate with?
The Cat Empire have long been role models of ours: we used to finish our gigs with a klezmer cover of ‘The Wine Song’. We love their energy and the way they irreverently meld a wide range of world music styles while remaining so distinctively Australia. Collaborating with or supporting them would be a dream come true.
What’s your advice to young people who want to make a career for themselves in the industry ?
Cliched as it may be, we have found success by backing ourselves and creating exactly what we want. I would recommend that every aspiring artist – and every established artist – be honest with themselves. People can sense authenticity, and they crave it.
What’s your favourite song to perform?
Probably our debut single ‘Kama At Yafa’ (Hebrew for ‘How Beautiful You Are’) – radio edit on Spotify and YouTube; full studio version here. We adopted a similar approach to ‘Toxic Moonlight’: we took a pop banger (this one released by ‘Israel’s Britney’ Shiri Maimon back in 2012) and married it with a big moment in the classical canon (in this case, Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade), making the whole thing unrecognisably more epic.
Soul songstress Sarit Michael is our guest vocalist for ‘Kama’ and she always delivers a spine-tingling performance, bringing to life the lyrics that speak so potently of resilience and hope. It feels as though the whole band lifts whenever we play the song, and I can feel our audiences lift with us.
Got any secret hobbies that we might be surprised by?
I’m a commuter cyclist, which freaks some people out. I’m also a passionate if uncommitted long distance runner, and once ran a marathon in northern Italy to get to a gig.
