Diwon is the newest in the litany of identities of Erez Safar, the producer/drummer/promoter/DJ/occasional backup vocalist. Perhaps best known for being one-half of the touring band for Orthodox hip-hop M.C. Y-Love, Safar, who’s always alluded to his Yemenite Jewish ancestry, is now openly embracing it with a new wardrobe, a new sound, and a new series of concerts. At his upcoming weeklong residency at the Jewish Museum, expect to hear a lot of traditional music, a lot of untraditional music, a guest appearance or two...and a straight guy in a shiny dress.

You’ve got a million aliases already—DJ Handler, Guy Emanuel, and, for a long time, the Prince-like mononome “Erez.” Why all the secret identities? Why the need to break this one out, and why now?

The only one that’s actually a secret is Guy Emanuel. Thanks a lot…Anyway, Saul Williams said that “words create worlds.” Different companies and different events I run, each one’s like a different conception, like the Beastie Boys, making a million aliases for every project. Each name represents the world I’m trying to create within the project.

DJ Handler I started before I became a DJ, and I never felt like it was me—it never really fit. I always knew I wanted a one-word handle, I just didn’t know what it was yet. Making Yemenite music under the name “Handler” sounded kind of absurd…and not in a good way.

For the folks out there without too much other Yemenite music to compare yours with, can you give us a cheat sheet on what Yemenite music is exactly?

I draw influences from a lot of cultures. Simply put, it’s music that Yemenites made. A lot of it’s influenced by the Muslims and Arabs that lived with them in Yemen—it has a Middle Eastern scaling similar to Sephardic music. Yemenite music might be a little more mantra-like, very repetitive.

They use the same melody throughout the whole service, don’t they?

The Kabbalat Shabbat part is. The evening service is different melodies, but yeah. To me, it’s really holy because the Yemenites didn’t move around a bunch. They just left Israel, and they stayed in one place. Even Moshe Feinstein says that the Yemenite pronunciation is the most accurate, because they never moved. To me, they seem like they’re the most in touch with the way it was in the beginning.

Actually, most people probably don’t know what Jews were doing in Yemen in the first place -- can you give us a thirty-second history lesson?

I have no idea how they got there. Locationally, it’s a lot closer to what was going on in the Bible than, say, Eastern Europe…

When you remix, what factors go into your musical reimagining?

Usually, I try to strip a song bare. I’ll take just vocals, and grab a keyboard line from somewhere. For instance, the woman who sold me my Yemenite clothing – it’s called Galdiya – she gave me a CD of her and her daughter singing. There was one song for the henna ceremony, just their voices and a darbouka [hand drum]. When I remixed that, I cut up the darbouka parts and laid out a 70s-style disco beat and layered on bass and snare drum parts, and textures, so it sounds electronic, and now it sounds really cool. It’s open. There aren’t too many instruments, so it plays as its own rhythm.

Do you ever pick artists or songs that you don’t like, or do you ever try to subvert or go against the original idea of a song?

Not really. Unless there’s insanely huge sums of money, but I haven’t really gotten there yet.

In your work with Y-Love, you’ve really straddled the boundary between the secular and the religious—using Spank Rock’s “Bump” song with pretty religious lyrics, for instance. Do you ever get complaints? Do Haredi people ever recognize the music or go “hey, what’s going on?”

I can never tell who knows it—I can’t tell whether people like the beat or whether people actually recognize it. On Martin Luther King Day in D.C., a bunch of people came up to me afterwards and complimented me on a Slick Rick beat I’d played, and none of them looked like someone who’d even know who Slick Rick was.

I don’t think that frum people who have an issue with secular beats would ever come to the show. Sometimes Charedi people come out to it, but they’re not Charedi Charedi, they’re Charedi-minus-one. They wouldn’t mind being at a hip-hop show, so they wouldn’t mind being at a Y-Love show.

This upcoming gig at the Jewish Museum is your first official show as Diwon. Do you have any special stuff planned?

I bought the clothing, so that’s going to be a surprise for a lot of people. I’m probably going to bring Miriam Zafri up. There’ll be some special guest vocalists, maybe Smadar—who’ll also be dressed in traditional vocals, maybe. My residency goes all week, so we can have lots of stuff planned. The live parts are Sunday evening and Thursday evening. Thursday is the closing ceremony—we’re expecting over a thousand people.

Why do you think 1980s-style synth-pop has this huge, undying love in Israel?

I thought all Israelis love Gwen Stefani and that was it. Israelis are the new Harajuku girls, and Diwon is the new Gwen.

Yeshiva pin-up: CataldoOne-woman band Emilia Cataldo’s e-mail signature says "I want to end up happy like everyone else." You have to wonder if it’s biting irony or an honest sentiment—after all, her music is chock full of both. Sincere, sweet, and sugary-voiced, Cataldo (who plays under the stage name Nehedar) is a product of that same New York singer-songwriter scene that produced Regina Spektor. Actually, she’s a byproduct of that scene and the uptown Washington Heights Jewish scene, having gone to Yeshiva University and been embraced by the Mima’amakim crowd of Orthodox experimental poets.

She was forced to drop out when her mother fell ill. In the years since, she’s lived on the street, cared for her teenage sister, and just happened to record like a maniac. After an uneven demo last year, Pick Your Battles (great songs, but the mixing is off), Nehedar returns with the just-released Dreamlike. It’s at once more mature and more playful, with weird folk-to-metal breakdowns that don’t only work but, astonishingly, soar.

What sort of Jew were you raised? What made you end up at Yeshiva University?

My upbringing was shamanistic/atheistic. I ended up at YU because of an experience at Rainbow Gathering after I ran away from home (with some permission)...I have been a poster child of the [religious] kiruv movement. Since then, I’ve felt a tremendous sense of empowerment over my religiosity.

There's been barely any time at all between the release of your first record and this album, and yet there's a world of thematic difference -- production values, lyrics, even the genres you sample from. What motivated the switch?

I had a big year after putting out the last album, and I'm addicted to recording. I went right back into the studio after Dreamlike came out. The style change is mostly based on my own ability to play guitar, which I didn't really have when Dreamlike came out. As far as different songs being in different genres, did I mention that my dad plays sax on ”Conspiratorium?” I was looking for a song to include him, so it had to be jazzy.

You've talked about being homeless and still playing concerts and keeping a steady creative output. What's that like? How do you balance the stuff that you need to do for life, and the stuff you need to do for your soul?

When I didn't really live anywhere I used to go to [guitarist] David Kesey’s on Monday nights and we would write new material on the spot. That was worth living for...”Dino” was a product of that kind of thing. As was "Subway Ratt." Otherwise I don't know how creative I really was. Being homeless is really about surviving.

Your parents are both formally trained musicians -- your father plays jazz sax, your mother is a classical pianist. Was music a big part of your household? Was there a period when you "broke away" -- stopped playing the music they wanted you to, started rocking out?

Music was a huge part of my house growing up. Since my parents were anti-establishment musicians, I think that my breaking out was a brief time between 13 and 16 when my parents didn't know what I was doing. Part of the fun of rebellion in my family was being a self-absorbed teen that didn't realize that their parents were cool.

You sing about some really depressing things, and yet, you never fail to sound chirpy when you're doing it. The first song on the new album springs to mind -- that chorus, "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out"? Where did that come from?

That song was REALLY FREAKING INTENSE. It was inspired by a combination of a friend jumping off of the Empire State Building and another intense experience ending with a family member in an institution in the same week.

Whoa.

That song ended up taking on multiple meanings—G-d talking to us, apologetically, about who He has to take out, and a main personality talking to a subordinate personality and claiming ownership over their body.

The chirpyness is because we are trapped in this reality and optimism translates. If someone spreads a pessimistic message, people will block it out. Negative messages are at least up for discussion.

What goes through your mind when you sing songs?

When I sing, I think about the song. There’s nothing else worth mentioning.

Portraits of the artists: Left, Celan; right, KaufmanAvant-garde musician Dan Kaufman fronts the band Barbez, who play a tangled and compelling web of experimental jazz, prog-rock, and Radiohead-and-Mogwai-influenced barely-pop. Force of Light, Kaufman’s breakaway solo debut, is surprising in several ways. For one thing, all the music is played by Barbez. For another, it’s a mostly-instrumental album composed of covers of poems.

The record’s subject is Paul Celan, a poet born in Romania who, after surviving the Holocaust, lived most of his life in France. While being held in a Romanian ghetto, he finished a major translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In later years, he turned his attention inward, both as an artist and an activist of the Holocaust. As a contemporary of Heidigger and Derrida, he looked at humanity with a mixture of despair and hope. Ultimately, though, despair won, and he drowned himself in the River Seine in spring 1970.

On the album, you quote a line from Celan’s "Conversation in the Mountains”: "What does a Jew have that is really his own/that is borrowed, taken, and never returned?" Why make a record about him?

I made the album about Celan primarily to honor him, to sort of place my stone of remembrance and love on his grave. The music is just one person's impression of his words, one way to hear them. I think this music, like his words, avoids dogmaticism. Music, by its nature, honors multiple points of view…and Celan had a fierce point of view.

I also wanted to introduce his work to people who might not know of it. One of the most satisfying parts of making this record has been people telling me that they went out and bought his books of poetry.

Was there a reason you released Force of Light under your own name and not the band’s?

It came out under my name because it was a very personal project of mine. I wanted my dear friends and closest collaborators working with me, and their contribution was phenomenal. But this record felt like a very personal document and it was realized and conceived in a different way than previous Barbez albums.

Something about Barbez's sound—a mix of old European folk music and ultra-modern droning guitars and waily ambient theremins and violins—really compliments Celan's balance between his experiences during WWII and his fairy tale-like imagery.

How much of your sound was laid out from the beginning, and how much of it was evolution?

It was pretty much all evolution. We knew it was going to be dark from the beginning. But our sound grew out of who was in the band and actually deliberately not having any predisposed idea of what we were going to do or sound like. There's such a wide spectrum of influence within us, from Schnittke to Black Sabbath, and that all filters into our sound.

How did you meet John Zorn? At what point did the album materialize?

John came to hear us one night performing music for a John Jesurun play at LaMaMa. The album came about rather beautifully and simply. He asked me if I'd like to make an album for the Jewish series on Tzadik. I had wanted to do something about Celan for years and it turned out he's a huge Celan fan as well.

How did you find Fiona Templeton to read Celan's lyrics? Was there any compulsion to do it yourself?

I used to go out with Fionaa—that's how I met her—and she's a wonderful poet and performance artist in her own right. I think she's one of the best poetry readers I've ever seen. I love how she lets the words speak for themselves. There's no special pleading. And yet there's real passion and a fierceness, like Celan's fierceness.

Remix contests, when done right, can be the coolest things in the world (ultra-hipster warning: refer to the Dismemberment Plan's fan-remixed best-of album that was their final release) or can, of course, be hackneyed cliches.

In honor of Y-Love's impending debut album, Shemspeed is throwing open the master-tape vaults and offering open access to the sounds and vocals, and hoping you come up with something better than they did. (Well, not better than -- it's a pretty incredible album, okay, let's hype it and say it's the best hip-hop album put out by a Bostoner Hasid EVER.)

So do your best -- if you're not sure how to make a remix, download Ableton to get started -- and we'll see what happens. Word is, next they're going to let you kids run wild with Pharaoh's Daughter, the Sephardic/world-music phenomenon who sounds really amazing without the use of blips and beeps. See if you can change my opinion about that.