I don’t care what you’ve been listening to today; I can confidently say that “Toxic Moonlight,” the latest track from Eora/Sydney-based klezmer punk collective Chutney will be the most surprising thing today. It might even be the most brilliant. The song combines Britney Spears’ pop anthem “Toxic” with Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” and it’s actually fantastic. It doesn’t end there though. The band brings together these seemingly disparate elements with their trademark Eastern European and Middle Eastern flair. And then we’ve got vocals from Ilan Kidron of The Potbelleez on top of that. It’s off the wall, but somehow it works!
“It was 2021 and we had a gig lined up with Ilan,” shared Chutney violinist Ben Adler. “We were in a reprieve between COVID lockdowns so we’d developed a certain nihilism that, in retrospect, was highly conducive to unfettered creativity. I was talking with Ilan about songs he’d like to sing with us, and he observed that the string riff in Toxic sounds “really klezmer” – we only discovered years later that it’s actually a Bollywood sample! Anyway, Ilan’s suggestion was all I needed to klezmer-ify Britney’s song. Something about its darkness and (toxic) romance then led me to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, especially after I realised that importing Beethoven’s descending bassline might open up a whole new set of possibilities for the otherwise pretty harmonically static ‘Toxic’ verses. I sketched up a chart and we tweaked it in rehearsal, at a gig and in the studio into its present form”.
“I was always really impressed with Mark Ronson’s version, and although Toxic had been covered plenty of times, I knew Chutney would translate it really daringly and originally,” Ilan added. “They have an unashamed ability to bend the rules; but somehow it works. This version plays between a dark oceanic void and a western bar fight. There is emotional drama and a dance between tension and release that I love here.”
Take a listen to this. I know it’s going to blow your mind. Chutney will continue bending the rules when they release their next album Ajar on August 6.
Photo credit: Max Goodman