“We steal lyrics from God,” claims the website for the band Stereo Sinai. It isn’t exactly a lie–the husband-wife duo, who hail from Chicago, take biblical verses, pair them with a catchy hybrid of electronic and folk-pop music, and turn them into songs.
Sometimes Stereo Sinai’s songs are sung in the voices of biblical characters, such as Sarah, Abraham’s wife, on the track “Lech Lecha.” In “Gideon’s Song,” Stereo Sinai turns a prophecy from the Book of Judges into a song for a baby’s naming. They recast a psalm from the time of the Temple into a contemporary song of celebration in “Hafachta Mispedi (Dance).”
We at MyJewishLearning are huge fans of the band–so much that we asked them to record a song, “Mi Yimalel,” for our own Hanukkah celebration. It’s available on our site as a free mp3–as well as on Biblegum Pop, one of two just-released albums by the band. The words might be thousands of years old, but Stereo Sinai’s sound feels both immediate and necessary.
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