Growing Carrots in a Concrete Floor
Ayelet Lerman, Wade Matthews, Carmel Raz
Duration 47.21 | Released March 2013
Ayelet Lerman: viola | Wade Matthews : digital synthesis & field recordings | Carmel Raz : violin |
Recorded by: Lars Sergel, March 2012, "Wire Tapping" at Barbur Gallery, Jerusalem.
About the Artists
Ayelet Lerman is a performance, installation and sound artist living in Jerusalem. She researches the non-verbal emotional field that stretches through the use of sound, music, sculpture, and movement. Ayelet was a young classical violist when she decided to look for new directions in life. She finished a BA in philosophy and biology and travelled in India. Her return to the art world was through her studies at the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem where she finished the four years course at 2010. Her final work, “Stringed”, an installation-performance, granted her an award from the Jerusalem Mayor. Since November 2010 she is the curator of “Wire Tapping”, the experimental music series at Barbur Gallery, Jerusalem. In June 2012, she concluded a year and a half residency program at mamuta at the Daniela Passal’s arts and media center in Jerusalem with a solo exhibition of performance-installations. She finds a place for her experimental art and music in numerous art events, festivals and exhibitions.
Advanced academic studies in composition helped French-born American musician Wade Matthews realize he was not interested in telling other people what or how to play. In 1989, he moved from New York to Madrid and became part of the international improv community. Drawing on his knowledge of electronic music, he approached the bass clarinet and alto flute as “acoustic synthesizers”, rethinking their sonic possibilities, phrasing, and relation to breath in a musical language based on real-time creation. When faster processors made laptop synthesis viable, Matthews returned to his first love, tweaking a virtual synthesizer to allow very rapid control of sound parameters for solo playing and dialog with others. In 2007, he founded INTERMEDIA 28 with photographer Adam Lubroth and guitarist Julio Camarena. There, he began to combine field recordings with electronic synthesis in a 2-computer setup that has since become his main instrument.
Carmel Raz composes, performs and researches music. Her music has been performed by a number or ensembles including the Arditti, Molinari, Carmel and Pacifica Quartets, the Kammerakademie Potsdam, the Orkest de Ereprijs, and the Musica Nova Consort. As a violinist, she has been featured as a chamber musician at Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw, and the Kennedy Center. She has performed with the Israel Contemporary Players, Ensemble Meitar, the Israel Contemporary String Quartet, and the Ensemble Modern Academy, and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchesterand has been featured at many international festivals.
Carmel is also active as an improviser, performing on violin, viola and mandolin in a variety of genres ranging from Jazz to free improv and world music. She plays with the Jewish music band Tafillalt, with whom she has performed across Europe, notably at the "Sounds of Israel" Festival in Hamburg and the Lviv Klezfest in Ukraine.
Born in 1982, Carmel holds a Diplom in violin performance from the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin, and a Masters degree in composition from the University of Chicago. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at Yale, working on a dissertation on the relationship between ideas about the nervous system and early Romantic music. More information at www.carmelraz.com
Presspectives
Eyal Hareuveni — All About Jazz — 03.06 2014
Operating for four years, the Wire Tapping series of experimental improvised meetings at the Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem has hosted many ad-hoc initial meetings between left-of-center musicians. The Series organized collaborations in the past with American drummer Gerry Hemingway, German double bass player Alexander Frangenheim and New York-based and Israeli ex-pat guitarist Eyal Maoz.
In March 2012 the series curator, viola player Ayelet Lerman hosted a meeting with American, Madrid-based electronics innovator Wade Matthews and American- Israeli classically-trained composer and violinist Carmel Raz and Lerman herself. The immediate, impatient shaping of a tight continuum of sounds by all three was later edited and released as Growing Carrots in a Concrete Floor.
Matthews transported the analog synthesizer sonic spectrum into his laptop and combined the vintage electronic sounds with various sound parameters and field recordings that allow him to interact with other musicians in real time. Lerman and Raz employ extended bowing techniques that enable both to tap to the delicate, transparent drones and noises produced by Matthews and later to sketch nuanced micro- tonal textures that expand the digital-based sounds to abstract and enigmatic tone poems. As this meeting progresses all three become more daring. The tension between the acoustic stringed instruments and the concrete electronic and field recordings sounds shifts organically between gentle and supportive dialogs and urgent, conflicting sonic collisions. The bows and strings are used on the third and sixth pieces to create fractured percussive sounds that trigger electronic sounds that intensify the intense interplay that culminates in an atmospheric electro-acoustic storms.
This unique trio succeeds to form imaginative coherent pieces, all charged with expressive power and energy.
Héctor Cabrero © Le son du grisli - 19.9.2013
Si l'on veut bien prendre en compte le titre de leur collaboration enregistrée en mars 2012 à Jérusalem, Ayelet Lerman (alto), Carmel Raz (violon) et Wade Matthews (aux ordinateurs) sont de bien curieux jardiniers.
Après avoir semé des orthoptères (sur field recordings), des archets caressant, des vents et de la pluie (toujours sur field recordings) et des graines d'électronique, tout pousse bizarrement. Les formes de leur culture sont nombreuses, par exemple l'improvisation des cordes, qui serait toute classique si Matthews ne jouait pas le rôle de tuteur en les contraignant avec des basses synthétiques. Ailleurs, il communique avec un langage d'homme-monstre et invite ses compagnes à bêcher. A force, ils retournent bien des choses qui font de leur électroacoustique une plantation dont on goûte les coins d'ombre et les jeux de lumière.
Jan Faix — His Voice Magazine - 13.5.2013
Řecký label Aural Terrains (vedený skladatelem Thanem Chrysakisem) nás pravidelně zásobuje novými tituly z oblasti experimentální hudby pohybující se většinou někde uprostřed mezi světem akustiky a elektroniky, mezi improvizací a kompozicí. Vždy přitom bývá skoupý na textové informace o hudbě samotné, aby neovlivňoval naši imaginaci, na jeho webových stránkách najdeme většinou jen profily o autorech.
V případě čerstvého CD Growing Carrots in a Concrete Floor se také z obalu dozvíme, že se jedná o záznam improvizovaného koncertu ze série Wire Tapping, kterou v Jeruzalémě pořádá izraelská violistka Ayelet Lerman. S ní si zde zahrála také americko-izraelská houslistka Carmel Raz a elektronický experimentátor amerického původu, Wade Matthews. Toto trio vyzkoušelo během více než třičtvrtěhodinového setu (na albu rozděleném na šest plynule propojených pouze číslovaných tracků) poměrně širokou paletu výrazových prostředků, od mikrošelestů přes plošnější textury šumů a mikrointervalově kolísajících tónů od všech tří hráčů, až po valivě energický proud plný nečekaných expresivních šlehů vycizelované digitální elektroniky i smyků a úderů obou smyčců po snad všech možných částech strunných nástrojů.
Trio si zřejmě nekladlo za cíl zkoumat nějaké hraniční či nové možnosti improvizované hudby, sledování jeho vzájemné komunikace a souhry nám to však plně vynahradí. Tento koncert se totiž skutečně vydařil, a to nejen po stránce opravdu citlivé práce na společném a dokonale soudržném projevu, ale i po stránce jeho záznamu a následného perfektního zvukového zpracování. S naprostou jistotu se tu v jednom akustickém prostoru pojí třeba flažolety s přednatočenými šepoty či podladěnými diktafony, perkusivní hra u kobylek třeba s granulační syntézou dekonstruovanými terénními nahrávkami všemožného původu. Akusmatické polohy jsou přitom v rovnováze také s jakoby mimoděk klasicizujícími. Výjimečně aristokratický zážitek za nearistokratickým názvem.
