Shelley Hirsch - O Little Town of East New York (1995)

"Besides her improvisations and collaborations, Hirsch writes and performs her own original compositions, amongst them three radio-plays: #39 (based on a text by Angela Carter), The Vidzer Family, and O Little Town of East New York. The Vidzer Family portrays a Jewish family with roots in Russia, who travelled to South America and ended up in Brooklyn's East New York in the 'sixties. O Little Town of East New York is a sort of sequel to it. It is a semi-autobiographical docu-musical about growing up in mid-century East New York. Hirsch recreates and inhabits remembered environments, situations and characters. She evokes the ethnically diverse neighbourhood: her Russian schoolmate's living room; the home of her own working class Jewish family; the synagogue; high school; the rallies against the Vietnam War; drugs. It's a hilarious, nostalgic, touching composition, merging avant and pop sensibilities. Critics praised her "dazzling technique" as well as her "wild, beautiful energy". The piece (later released on Tzadik) won the prestigious Prix Futura in Berlin (1993)".

"Hirsch's creative transformations of kitschy fragments and her skilled shaping of multiple dimensions suggest a quality central to the surrealist doctrine, the merveilleux: "a rupture in the order of reality." Her methods go beyond conventional definitions of composition and of performance. By violating logical, linear narrative forms, by opposing elements from our known world in disturbing ways, she plunges herself, and her audience, into collective reminiscences so visceral that they seem almost visual---a surreal accomplishment in itself". Anne Le Baron in Reflections on Surrealism in Postmodern Music.

David Weinstein: programming, sampling, performer.
Shelley Hirsch: lyre, programming, main performer, sampling, vocals.

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