SARATOGA SPRINGS­– The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, announces the second annual Days of Intonement, a space for music, sound, and reflection on Sunday, Sept. 28, at 2 p.m. The event features a workshop, sound experiences, and a performance situated in the season of the Jewish High Holidays. Open to all, the program expects no prior knowledge of, or experience with any religious traditions.

  • 2 pm: Hands-on Kleztronica Workshop: Engage with DJ Chaia’s philosophy and performance practice of cultural sampling and witness Yiddish archives turn into contemporary beats. Kleztronica melds traditional Yiddish music with contemporary electronic genres like house and techno.
  • 3:30 pm: Intonement Ritual: Inspired by (but straying far from) Jewish traditions of gathering, (a)toning, and releasing what we no longer need, sound artist Adam Tinkle leads a sequence of collective rituals and sound experiences sampled freely from High Holiday liturgy.
  • 4:30 pm: Kleztronica DJ Set Performance by Chaia: Accordion, vocals, and samples weave together to invite audiences to engage with ritual, intergenerational trauma, and the echoes of ancestral memory.

Chaia is an electronic composer working at the intersection of Yiddish culture and electronic club music. She weaves archival Yiddish samples with techno and ambient frameworks, creating hybrid folkloric-electronic compositions that situate ancestral sound within global and liberatory rave ecologies. In live performance, she weaves together accordion, vocals, and samples, inviting audiences to engage with ritual, intergenerational trauma, and the echoes of ancestral memory.

Chaia works closely with Yiddish archives to identify, highlight, and catalogue Yiddish material for her electronic work. These include the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, The Yiddish Book Center, Yiddish Song of the Week, and the personal archives of Hankus Netsky and the Hoffman Family. She has performed internationally at The NAMM Show, Pop Montreal, KlezMore Vienna, Shtetl Berlin, and Sonic Territories, She has been profiled by Grammy.com, NPR’s Art of the Story, Annabel Ross, and others. Chaia has collaborated with Russell Elevado, Dan Tombs, Sidney Mills, and the Klezmatics, and her work has been supported by New York State Council for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, The Goethe Institute, and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. This past June Chaia released her debut album, Yiddish Electronic.

Adam Tinkle is associate professor of media and film, and director of the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS), and a multidisciplinary artist focused on sound, video, collaborations, and the deployment of technologies of sensation and spectacle in negotiation with bodies and infrastructures. After studies in music with avant-garde legends Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, Anthony Davis, and Pauline Oliveros, his soundworks have taken disparate forms, from sound sculptures to song cycles to music-theater to the “SoundMind” series of sonic mindfulness workshops he led on the Tang’s mezzanine between 2016 and 2019. His “visual music” practice, which reimagines expressive uses for antique TV equipment, yields glimmering, painterly abstractions and immersive spaces, as in the intimate and vulnerable explorations of screenlight and screenlife featured in his 2022 solo exhibition at the Arts Center of the Capital Region. More recently, his work has appeared in the form of “Farillon,” a monumental abstract chiming timepiece selected for the inaugural Troy Glow festival, a series of interactive video baths most recently presented at Club SPA Spa and the Flaherty Film Seminar, and new album releases of electroacoutsic experimental improvisations with his duo Sun Dogs and his trio Seven Count.

Information may be obtained at 518-580-8080 or by visiting tang.skidmore.edu. This program is co-sponsored by Skidmore College’s Jacob Perlow Event Series and the Tang.