By Eyal Hareuveni & Nick Ostrum

Dror Feiler is an Israeli-Swedish experimental composer, reeds participant
(and a collector of uncommon and classic reeds devices and bells ), and
multimedia artist. Feiler, now 72 years previous, can also be a staunch and
vocal, left-wing activist who has been preventing towards all types of
fascism and for the Palestinian liberation from the Israeli occupation.

Maavak (מאבק, wrestle in Hebrew) is monumental, two-10-cd field units that
summarize greater than forty years and seventy concert events and different musical
initiatives by the not often documented Feiler. Maavak can also be the identify of the
Seventies Israeli Marxist-Leninist group – The Revolutionary Communist
Alliance – and its anti-colonialist journal. These restricted editions of
300 field units have been launched by Feiler’s personal Celestial Fireplace imprint
(titled after his debut album, Anckarström, 1991) and by Swedish sound
artist Joachim Nordwall’s iDEAL Recordings.

Feiler’s music is intense, pressing and demanding – clearly for the
harmless listener but additionally for the musicians, who’re themselves
listeners, and is supposed to be skilled dwell. Its uncooked and bodily,
transformative and destabilizing energy and its politicizing aural
setting are organized with the “Brutal Sentimental Idea” and its
radical, unifying precept of noise as kind. Feiler explains briefly
his musical imaginative and prescient in Maavak’s stunning liner notes: “It’s a type of
tapestry woven from contradictory, calculated clouds of sounds and
melodies during which every particular person expression displays the absent complete…
My intention is for a chaotic, incomplete kind to function a
counterpoint to a positivistic, well-groomed and full kind. (Noise)
has shock worth, and defamiliarizes the listener who expects from music
a simple fluency, a safe familiarity, or any type of mollification… I
place significance on the precision of sounds versus imprecision and the
relationship between synchrony and asynchrony. Going from dysfunction to
order in music could be attention-grabbing, however going from dysfunction right into a
larger dysfunction pursuits me much more… The extra it provides to listeners,
the much less it affords them. It requires the listener spontaneously to
compose its inside motion and calls for of him not mere contemplation however
praxis”.

The field units are organized by particular instrumentation, orchestration,
or themes and supply the wealthy musical universe of Feiler – works for
organ, clarinets and bells, music containers, noise (principally carried out solo by
Feiler), solo saxophones, chamber music and chamber orchestras,
violin/s. We targeted on a couple of works of Feiler. Feiler’s brutal noise
imaginative and prescient could be skilled within the 54-minute explosive and abrasive, manic
and cruel assaults of “Music is Castrated Noise no. 1” (2008) (there
are actually ten works on this collection, for various instrumentations),
carried out by Feiler and different noise comrades – Tommy Björk (who performs
with Feiler within the free jazz unit Lokomotiv Konkret), Tommi Keränen (who
performs in Paal Nilssen-Love’s Massive Unit), Raymond King, Mats Lindström
(who performed in Mats Gustafsson’s Fireplace! Orchestra), Lasse Marhaug (who
meticulously mastered and designed the field units) and Kasper T Toeplitz.

“L’extension du Area de la Lutte no. 2” (2022) borrows its title from
a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq and is carried out by the
Belin-based up to date ensemble zeitkratzer, directed by Reinhold
Friedl, and carried out by Feiler (and launched earlier than in zeitkratzer’s
noise … [lärm], Tourette, 2002 which provided different works by
like-minded composers – Masami Akita a.ok.a. Merzbow and Zbigniew
Karkowski). This orchestral work introduces noise into up to date
music however in a subversive, primal method when “the intuitive molten
metallic brutality of the music brings the participant into a brand new vitality, a brand new
music is created, a brand new pace of considering and feeling the place the
mind meets manic raver”, as Feiler tells.

The quick title piece, “Maavak” (1981), is the earliest composition in
these field units and is carried out by an ensemble of eight wind gamers,
six double bass gamers, and 6 percussionists and stresses the
unconventional orchestration of Feiler, with no noise makers, however
already then with a powerful unsettling and destabilizing sensibility.
“Halat Hisar” (2009) (حـالـة حـصـار, state of siege in Arabic, but additionally
the title of a set of poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish)
for bass flute ready piano and symphonic orchestra and carried out by
the Bayerische Rundfunk Orchestra. This lyrical and highly effective
composition, with its machine gun-like percussive pulse, pertains to the
Israeli siege on Gaza Strip. Feiler himself took half within the freedom
flotillas to Gaza, was arrested by Israeli safety forces and for a couple of
years was even banned from getting into Israel.

“Tikkun Olam” (2018) (תִּיקּוּן עוֹלָם in Hebrew, that means repairing of
the world, an idea in Judaism that refers to numerous types of motion
meant to restore and enhance the world) was carried out by the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra carried out by Ilan Volkov with sax participant
Mats Gustafsson and Lasse Marhaug and Feiler himself, as noise makers.
This dramatic composition, with its unusual hissing soundscapes and
all-out blasts evoking Edgard Varèse for the twenty-first century, appears
to posit the therapeutic of the world as a painful, even violent, course of.
Actually, other than the title, one doesn’t detect a lot hope or
respite. It’s unnerving however shifting. What’s putting isn’t just the
eerie orchestral drone and militaristic imagery that propels “Tikkun
Olam”. Within the context of the field units, one can also be struck by the myriad
methods Feiler explores noise inside up to date composition. It additionally
retains with Feiler’s personal Brutal Sentimental Idea, whereby noise and
melody function counterpoints to one another to disarm, confuse and
interact the listener. Contemplate me disheartened, bemused and totally
entranced.

The final composition in these field units, “Epexegesis” (2018-19)”
demonstrates the relevance of Feiler’s work for our lives, as lively,
engaged and anxious listeners in addition to human beings motivated to
make the world higher. This composition was written for 2 soloists –
the vocalist Blixa Bargeld (of Einstürzende Neubauten fame) and Feiler
on reeds and dwell electronics – and Stavanger Symphony Orchestra
carried out by Volkov and recorded on the Tectonics Competition in Stavanger,
Norway. This shifting and unhappy composition, with the charismatic and
passionate oratory of Bargeld, adapts a textual content of Palestinian,
Stockholm-based poet Ghayath Almadhoun that captures an imaginary
dialog of a lifeless Palestinian sufferer, supposedly apologizing for
the Israeli sniper who killed him and deconstructing his – and the
Western tradition – that allowed such a barbaric, mindless act.m

The liner notes of Maavak finish with an enlightening quote from French
thinker Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s pamphlet from 1754: “All types of
freedom are interconnected, and are equally harmful: The liberty of
music initiates the liberty of feelings, which in flip initiates the
freedom of ideas, resulting in freedom of motion, and freedom of motion
is the state’s primary enemy”.