Maya Shenfeld trained as a guitarist, learning classical guitar at university in her native Jerusalem and later playing electric guitar in assorted art projects in Berlin. You can see her online, playing her instrument through a laptop and a host of effects pedals; improvising over tape loops; or leading an ensemble of 11 guitarists to rework Julius Eastman’s minimalist classic Gay Guerrilla until it sounds like a Sonic Youth track.
But Shenfeld’s debut album doesn’t feature any guitar. Instead it explores texture and grain using analogue synths, brass and human voices. A lot of music rooted in drone-based minimalism can be quite harmonically tedious, but Shenfeld’s compositions go places. Sadder Than Water, the longest track here, sounds like a Bach fugue being played in slow motion by Wendy Carlos; Body, Electric is a series of descending, constantly modulating synth arpeggios over a warm blanket of drones; Voyager sounds like one of the more compelling instrumentals from David Bowie’s Low. Shenfeld also creates space-age soundscapes using acoustic sources: the opening and closing tracks create sepulchral tones by exaggerating the natural resonances of brass instruments; while Mountain Larkspur sees her getting a youth choir to sing in ghostly, microtonal harmonies.
In Free Fall was apparently inspired by the German-Japanese artist Hito Steyerl, whose essay of the same name discusses the disappearance of the horizon and the dismantling of linear perspective. But, in finding ways of representing disorientation, Shenfeld often invokes the numinous and the transcendent. She has written about the rivalry in Israel between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv – the tragic, ancient holy city versus the groovy beachside party town – and how she identifies strongly with the former. Weirdly, that austere spirit of Jerusalem haunts the entire album – this is music that uses 21st-century technology to conjure up images of liturgical chants and ancient temples.
Also out this month
Two New York jazz musicians, bassist Mat Muntz and drummer Vicente Hansen Atria, have collaborated as the Vex Collection (18 February, Carrier Records) to explore assorted double reed instruments, from Croatian and Highland bagpipes to instruments that they’ve invented and created using a 3D printer. The result is a series of ecstatic punky improvisations filled with a wild, distorted energy.
On Temporality of the Impossible (11 February, Huddersfield Contemporary Records) Serbian-born, Brussels-based violinist Dejana Sekulić plays seven pieces by likeminded composers, a series of angular, mutilated violin solos in slow motion, sometimes accompanied by her whispering, sighing and screeching vocals.
