Case Study
Alphabet of Wrongdoing
Daniela Gesundheit
Music
Alphabet of Wrongdoing is a ritual in sound.
A reimagining of Jewish ceremonial prayers shaped for secular space, born from a spontaneous invitation to sing liturgy before a concert and evolved into a profound, durational performance work.This limited edition box set is a carefully crafted artifact, offered as both listening experience and object of contemplation.
...tension between tradition and reinterpretation.
Each boxset includes:
Two heavyweight vinyl records, featuring new musical renderings of liturgical prayers and communal confessions
A companion book, containing the full libretto, essays, and visual materials contextualizing the project’s spiritual and aesthetic inquiries
Limited to 200 hand-numbered copies, designed as intimate offerings rather than mass commodities
The title comes from the Ashamnu, or “Alphabet of Wrongdoing”—an ancient confessional prayer recited communally during the High Holy Days. Through voice, synthesizer, silence, and repetition, the album explores themes of reckoning, forgiveness, mortality, and spiritual accounting (cheshbon ha’nefesh).
The box set’s design challenges and engages through its bold use of typographic patterns, color, and image, echoing the album’s central tension between tradition and reinterpretation. Visual elements reflect the layered nature of the work: devotional but deconstructed, sacred but questioning, grounded in ancestry yet speaking to the present.
This music is for liminal moments—when answers fall short, and listening becomes an act of survival. As poet Alan Felsenthal writes, it attempts to “restore dignity to existence through music.”
Alphabet of Wrongdoing has been performed at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Human Resources and Night Gallery in Los Angeles, the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto, Ursa and Pop Montreal in Montreal, and the Jane Hotel and Ballroom in NYC.
Idée fixe
