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"Ezekiel has become something of an amateur musicologist. She finds raw material in songbooks from the old Yiddish theater and from the shtetls and other villages of Eastern Europe. She makes field recordings at culturally rich locales such as a Lower East Side bagel shop staffed entirely by Turkmen Jews and a Bronx retirement home filled with Jewish seniors. Then she reconstructs the melodies to write new songs for her band's repertoire-a process reminiscent of the 16th-century rabbi who, according to legend, created the golem monster out of clay. 'We're this kind of out-of-control monster that is good at heart,' Ezekiel explains, 'but we don't have gloves on when we're touching old music. We're like monsters going through the music and tearing it up.'"
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