LINER NOTES · 01

To a ten-year-old kid, the concrete dvor behind our apartment block in Kyiv was an entire empire. I ran the playground courts, watched Dynamo matches, and lived a childhood that felt completely beautiful, safe, and blissfully unaware.

I didn’t know the Soviet Union was quietly fracturing to pieces. I didn’t even know what religion was.

But looking back, the anomalies were everywhere. I remember our drunk neighbors pounding on the apartment door, shouting slurs into the hallway.

I remember the heavy, glittering branches of the massive tree my parents forced us to decorate inside every single winter. I thought we just really loved New Year’s.

I didn’t realize until much later that it was an operational camouflage shield — a physical decoy so our neighbors wouldn’t discover we were Jewish.

My parents hid our identity from the world, and they hid it from me.

They knew that if a kid went out to play and let the truth slip to his friends, he’d get broken on the playground.

Yiddish FM is where the silence finally ends.

Yiddish FM is my living archive. I take the sounds I grew up around — klezmer clarinet, Hebrew prayer, the Slavic melodies of a Kyiv courtyard — and fuse them with every genre I love, from reggae to hip hop to rock and dance. Like the collage behind this page, each track is cut and pasted together — klezmer, prayer, a Kyiv courtyard — fused with whatever genre fits the story. No barriers, just bridges: every track below is one piece of that story. Listen, tune in — and if one moves you, take a piece of the archive home with you.