Music is immaterial: Maya Shenfeld

I’m inspired by Kirby’s use of time stretching, and reverb which conjures a ghostly, and haunted sound. The processing becomes a means of expression of a larger tale, Kirby’s sense of loss of the underground culture as he writes:  “The idea for ‘The Death Of Rave’ was conceived in early 2006 after a visit to the Berghain Club in Berlin. At the time Berghain was about to explode on the international club scene as a temple. The feeling was in the air that something special was happening. I went and saw a pale shadow of the past. Grim and boring beats, endlessly pounding to an audience who felt they were part of an experience but who lacked cohesion and energy. For me personally something had died. Be it a spirit, be it an ideal, be it an adventure in sound. Rave and techno felt dead to me.”

Feldman writes in “Give my regards to eighth street” about the way he weaves sounds as a tapestry. I love this analogy. Palais de Mari is an ode to the tension between stillness and movement. The score consists of an elaborate grid, despite the subtle, and slow changes, the performer has to remain hyper-focused throughout the performance, counting the changing time signatures. But the feeling is that of an extended time.

It’s hard and heartbreaking to imagine that during his life Eastman was rejected by the New York downtown 70s experimental scene. He navigated the same circles as Glass, Reich, and John Cage, but wasn’t accepted, due to his identity, to his “queerness” and race. Luckily his music has been rediscovered and celebrated in the last decade or so. In 2018, I was fortunate to lead a reenactment of this piece, performed by an ensemble of 16 women playing bass and guitar, for a concert series titled Disappearing Berlin. We played during sunset, on the top floor of Berlin’s postbank Hochhaus, which is one of the few skyscrapers in the city. Getting to know the music so closely, and performing it with this ensemble that came together for just one night, is one of the most memorable and inspiring experiences I’ve had in the last few years.

The lyrics. The modulations. The arpeggiators. I often listen to this song in gloomy Berlin days, it gives me the energy to get going.

Celestial sounds, in a free and flowing form. I notice my breath and my pace changing the minute I start listening to this record.

A breathtaking new production by Aboulafa and producer Franceso Sanalucia of a  traditional Algerian song from the Arab-Andalusian repertoire. Sounds which remind me of home and connect me to my Moroccan roots.

After meeting Ginzburg in Berlin in 2018, I couldn’t stop listening to this record. There’s the Ginzburg signature heavily distorted, compressed and controlled sound. It’s industrial and feels like listening to shamanic percussive music, played in an abandoned dancehall.

Mahler is where I go for drama, for grand orchestration, for the brass section. I particularly love the opening of the C minor symphony, the way he’s telling a story, taking us on an epic adventure. It’s a classic.

This canonical piece coined the term deep listening, and not through what you’d think. Deep here refers to the meditative sonic experience, but also, to the fact the music was quite literally recorded in 1988 14 ft deep underground, in the Dan Harpole underground cistern in Port Townsend.