Awesome Article on Stereo Sinai in the Chicago Jewish News!

Thumpers! Stereo Sinai has been featured in the most recent edition (the arts special, in fact) of the Chicago Jewish News! But to save you the digital leg-work, we've reprinted the full article right here for your reading enjoyment. We're just that proud of it. (Thanks, CJN!)

New tunes, ancient words

By CJN staff (08/28/2009)

They say they play Biblegum pop. Look at the word again. No, Miriam Brosseau and Alan Jay Sufrin, the pair who make up StereoSinai, are not reincarnations of the 1910 Fruitgum Company or the Ohio Express. Still, there are certain similarities. "We define ourselves as bubblegum pop music in biblical Hebrew," Sufrin says. One of the most unusual and innovative new bands on the Jewish music scene (although not exclusively there, Brosseau and Sufrin insist), StereoSinai came into being in a way that is as out-of-the-ordinary as their modus operandi. And it all started with a rabbi. Brosseau and Sufrin met when both were students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where they belonged to a songwriters group. He was more into folk music, she into punk rock. They started writing music together and after graduation, moved to Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. (They married in February.) There they found Rabbi Asher Lopatin, the popular spiritual leader of Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel Congregation. "He was so extremely welcoming to us," Brosseau relates. "His whole family reached out to us. Since they had been so kind to us, we wanted to do something for their baby" - Gideon, now almost two years old. They decided to write a lullaby and, for inspiration, looked to the original story of Gideon in the Book of Judges. "We found a couple of verses that were very appropriate, about the angel of G-d coming to Gideon and telling him he would be very strong and that G-d would be with him," Brosseau says. "Alan started tinkering around on guitar and came up with a riff, and that was Gideon's song, our first single. We fell in love with the sound and started experimenting with other verses, other styles." That was the beginning of StereoSinai's unique sound, which marries "bubblegum pop, the same style as the stuff you hear on pop radio," in Sufrin's words, with verses in biblical Hebrew and, occasionally, Aramaic and Yiddish. While the music is original, the words come from the Torah, the Talmud and the Tanach - "the best lyrics in the world," the pair say. "We like to say we steal lyrics from G-d," Brosseau says. "If Kelly Clarkson had been on the mountain with Moses, it would have sounded a little like our music," Sufrin adds. StereoSinai is different from many other modern bands in other ways as well. It is a download-only operation - no CDs - for a number of reasons. One is environmental. "CD packaging is harmful to the environment at every step of its existence, from production to disposal," Sufrin says. (Find the songs at http://www.stereosinai.com/) There's also a financial motive - for the consumer. Downloads, at $1 a song, are definitely cheaper than CDs, and listeners can pick and choose which songs they want. This is a trend in the music industry, Sufrin notes, with 88 percent of American adults downloading their music rather than purchasing CDs. There is also an aesthetic aspect to the high-fidelity MP3 format the duo uses. It produces better sound at an initially lower volume, Sufrin explains. "People confuse loud with good," he says. "Music has gotten louder and does more damage to people's ears. You can listen to StereoSinai's music and it is more nuanced, a more pleasing sound at a lower volume. It's music to your ears, music to your wallet and music to the earth." "It's all about consumer empowerment," Brosseau adds. "You can choose your own songs, make your own mixes, make the music your own. Our philosophy and value system is very tech-forward with high-quality music that is eco-kosher." Since that first song for the rabbi's baby, StereoSinai has garnered attention in diverse cultural venues. The duo played at the International Jewish Music Festival in Amsterdam last year (they also became engaged there) and was the first band commissioned to write a song for G-dcast.com, a Web site aimed at Jewish teens that narrates and illustrates the weekly Torah portion through animation. The band's song about Lech Lecha (coincidentally, also Sufrin's bar mitzvah portion) is downloadable for free on the site. They are also intensely interested in how they can use their musical talents for good. "Tzedakah is a big part of our project," Sufrin says. They contributed a track to Pioneers for A Cure, a Jewish music project that honored Israel's 60th anniversary and raised money for cancer research, and also recently worked on a project for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. A song they wrote in college, "11 Below," was released as a download with all the proceeds going to the coalition - fitting, they say, because the homeless suffer during Chicago's cold winters. "We have ourselves in a couple of different camps," Brosseau says. "There are the Jewish audiences at synagogues and Hillel gigs, but we've done at least as many bar gigs out in the regular everyday secular world. Somebody just told us his five-year-old daughter was a huge fan of StereoSinai. I don't think we would define ourselves as Jewish music. We're feeling out where our audience is."