"Then the people hear something they haven't heard before — but they're intrigued, not annoyed," recites visionary poet 99Hooker on clarinetist David Krakauer's new album.

That listeners will be intrigued is certainly the open-minded reaction Krakauer is hoping for when they hear "Bubbemeises: Lies My Gramma Told Me" (Label Bleu).

They ought to be. It's a raucous, wildly fun and funny new collaboration with Socalled (Josh Dolgin), a DJ (also Yiddish singer and accordion player) who appeared briefly on Krakauer's spirited album "Live in Krakow" a couple of years ago.

The resulting hybrid — heavy shtetl? — crosses klezmer kinetics with fuzz guitar, club beats, samples, tape loops and several other stripes of musical madness.

Krakauer and his aptly named band, Klezmer Madness, perform at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Triple Door ($15-$18; 206-838-4333, www.thetripledoor.net).

Krakauer is an award-winning clarinet virtuoso whose collaboration with the Kronos Quartet on Osvaldo Golijov's "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind" was voted one of the 10 best discs of 1997 by Time Out Magazine. The clarinetist met Socalled five years ago at a Canadian klezmer festival.

"In 2001, he gave me this CD he made in his basement, 'The Hip Hop Seder,' " said Krakauer, by telephone from New York. "I looked at it a bit askance, thinking, 'What is this going to be, another kitschy/schlocky thing?' Then I put it on my CD player and I was completely blown away."

Krakauer has never been shy about pushing the limits of traditional klezmer, the late 19th-century wedding music of Eastern European Jews, which enjoyed a revival in the 1980s.

"When I joined the Klezmatics, they were playing transcriptions of 1939 Dave Tarras arrangements," said Krakauer, referring to one of American klezmer's founders. "I wanted to do crazy stuff — bring in my Sidney Bechet and James Brown influences, quarter tones, overtones, circular breathing."

Playing at the old Knitting Factory, downtown Manhattan's haven for avant-garde jazz, Krakauer helped spark what would later be dubbed Radical Jewish Culture by reed man and composer John Zorn.

Krakauer played on Zorn's watershed 1992 piece, "Kristallnacht," in Munich, and made the first album on Zorn's Tzadic label, "Klezmer Madness." Krakauer followed it with the inventive "A Klezmer Tribute to Sidney Bechet."

With its extensive use of samples, "Bubbemeises" is unlike anything Krakauer has done. The album opens with the voice of the Jewish comedian (and character actor) Herschel Bernardi, declaring with comic gravity, "But now we come to the period that I call the battle for identity," followed by a hilarious litany/rap of Jewish grandmother myths — "If you can kiss your elbows, you're probably gay."

Other tracks offer atmospheric electronics; a bell-like hip-hop riff; pumping accordion backbeats; chicken-scratch electric guitar; warbling, Middle Eastern vocals; 99Hooker's visionary, neo-beat poem, "Bus Number 9999"; and, of course, plenty of chattering, wailing, laughing, chirping, soaring, crying klezmer clarinet.

Krakauer performs here with the band on the album, which includes the marvelous drummer Mike Sarin, who grew up in Seattle and attended Cornish College.

Though Klezmer madness is steeped in post-modern irony and pokes fun at Jewish tradition, its irreverence is really reverence, masked.

"For me," says Krakauer, "to play klezmer music is to connect with something that was lost to me, but to collect an ember that's still alive, like the way my grandmother used to speak."