Calvin College
Festival of Faith & Music
The Psalters 
The Psalters project desires to create a new song for a new exodus through a renewal of transformative, interactive music and prayer combined into a new devotional form rooted in crying out to the God of liberation to free us from our various enslavements. Begun in 1996 in the streets of Philadelphia, the project has consisted of over 100 artists, activists, theologians, ethnomusicologists, anarchists, students, teachers, and dropouts from over six countries. For the past three years it has morphed into a nomadic community of eight committed artists living on an old bus experimenting with creating a sound from a homeless, intentionally empire-resisting lifestyle.
The musical influence has stemmed primarily from studying people groups who have gone through some kind of exodus, and the sound that has emerged from those struggles. The project draws heavily from ancient Jewish music, gypsy songs, Kurdish folk music, elements that have emerged from the African diaspora through the slave trade, such as Afro-Brazilian and gospel music, folk traditions from Appalachia, as well as distorted guitars, electronics, and experimental sounds from the American underground. Instrumentation includes a myriad of ethnic strings including hurdy gurdy, banjo, bouzouki, and various fiddles, accordions and harmonicas backed by a percussive army mixing ethnic drums such as doumbek, djembe, daf, congas, and fusing them with hybrid barrel drums.
The vocals consist of a combination of ancient chants from middle-eastern and native American traditions, blues singing and folk-punk protestifying while still retaining accessibility to western ears with predominantly English lyrics. Sometimes performing on the street, sometimes in living rooms and basements, sometimes at churches, as well as fusing together the ancient and modern by combining these ethnic sounds with samples, dancing, video projections and fire dancing for their larger full assault on the senses multi-media stage shows.