Tomer Damsky & The Quantum Choir | Sunken Sun, Sunken Soul:
Lament for a Hebrew Tune
Marco Milevski Tomasin | OrgaDoom
Muhammad Cheetah
DeluZEN: A Contemplative Tour with Lior Pinsky
Tomer Damsky & The Quantum Choir | Sunken Sun, Sunken Soul: Lamet for a Hebrew Tune
No one in the world, it seems, would want to hear Hebrew folk music right now. Yet, amidst the opening cracks of reality, the Quantum Choir dares to cry out the songs that have been telling, for over a century, about the wounded shards of this place.
From a lullaby in Yiddish to a labor song, from a Russian homeland anthem to a song of abject poverty, and from a Bedouin love song to a kibbutznik’s tune of debauchery: Hebrew song tells more than one story, not only about hope and bravery, but also about the abyss of despair. From the depths of the sound archive, composer and researcher Tomer Damsky has carefully collected ethnographic recordings of songs from the early days of the Yishuv in Palestine, focusing on the depression, frustration, and pain experienced by the early laborers. After extracting them from the archive, she reconstructed them for choir, wind instruments, and drums. Through their deconstruction, a path was revealed, for dismantling the broken narratives of this geopolitical space, for listening to the voices of the past, listening through them, and letting them cry out.
The new and ambitious project of the Quantum Choir comes to HaZira for a rare performance: just before the songs are released as an album and buried once more in the archive from which they came, they will rise from oblivion one more time, to open an imagined space where the melodies keep rolling and changing, to find within the darkness between the sounds a space for cleansing and consolation.
The Quantum Choir, founded by Damsky, is a vocal ensemble that combines contemporary works with radical interpretations of liturgical music. Its repertoire ranges from early polyphony and ancient hymns to folk, metal, drone, and contemporary music. Since its establishment in 2021, it has performed, among other places, at the Israel Museum, the Museum of Italian Jewish Art, the Bat Yam Museum, Diver Festival, and Autumn Cult Festival, recording original works for BBC radio and Ars Electronica Festival, and collaborating with artists and composers including Naama Zisser and Gilad Ratman.
A project by Tomer Damsky (Research, arrangement, artistic direction, executive production)
The Quantum Choir: Singers – Or Aloni, Ilan Barkani, Aya Gavriel, Ido Ben Ami Zohar, Maya Penington, Naomi Shalev, Ron Sheskin, Peter Shapiro, Tomer Damsky. Wind instruments and singing: Amir Lekach Avivi, Noya Fox, Yuval Itzhaki. Drums – Rotem Trifman.
Sound: Ori Kadishay
Transcriptions and research assistance: Amir Lekach Avivi
Marco Milevski Tomasin | OrgaDoom
Seven years ago, when the new tunnels on Highway 1 were inaugurated, Marco Milevski and Eyal Bitton were sitting in the car, stuck in the tunnel in an eternal traffic jam. Suddenly, in one synchronized moment, the walls of the tunnel trembled to the horns of dozens of vehicles. Beneath the thick layer of dissonance, one truck honked in the interval of a fifth. That intense moment, in which one could only sit still, absorb the barrage of horns, and discover the order within chaos, resonated within Milevski’s body for years afterward. In early 2024, he embarked on a research journey into the horn itself. The encounter with that primal mechanism and the raw sound it produces awakened Milevski’s primordial curiosity, the impulse to dismantle the mechanism and observe it from within, and the fantasy of replicating the sound to infinity.
The horn, like an extension of the crying human mouth, has undergone evolutionary processes throughout history that are deeply rooted in humanity’s defining myths. It is the herald on the city walls, announcing a feast as well as an impending war, both the arrival of the king and the approach of foe; it is the aulos of Dionysus, luring the listener into a haze of ecstasy; it is the trumpet of Doom’s Day, raising the dead from their graves; it is the siren, the alarm, the warning; it replaces the scream of the person whose voice is no longer sufficient; and when duplicated, when transformed from singular to plural, it becomes the thunderous organ that simulates the sound of divine thunder.
For a year, in a meditative process where the act of production itself (and not the result) is the heart of the matter, Marco Milevski dismantled, assembled, ordered materials, printed, carved, replicated, sculpted, stretched, measured, fitted, bolted, and gave matter a voice. After what seemed like endless hours immersed in an internal space of pipes, compressors, motors, and rubber bands, he comes to Deluziot to open the door to a process of developing a multi-horn electro-acoustic musical instrument, a mechanical organ unique in its kind: OrgaDoom, the voice that cries out the earthquake of reality.
The project is developed as part of a continuous research residency in HaZira.
Infrastructure, object development, support, and guidance: HaZira Tech Poetry
Technical-artistic support: Amit Drori
Code: Daniel Treistman
Muhammad Cheetah
Fifty percent prophet, fifty percent tiger, one hundred percent Shoah: Yissachar Piro and Uri Crystal, the godfathers of Jerusalem’s industrial-noise scene, named their duo after Muhammad Cheetah, a Congolese striker who, according to legend, almost signed with Beitar Jerusalem but disappeared at the last moment after hearing about the hell awaiting Muslim football players at the Teddy Stadium. When the duo tried to print t-shirts, the factory took the initiative to censor the word “Muhammad” with a black rectangle.
For at least two decades, Crystal (Mujahadeen, SubSonic, Van Paznowsky) and Piro (Remesh, Pica/Cain, Slaves Energy) have existed on the streets of Jerusalem, absorbing despair and compressing it into torn sounds and primeval beats. Sometimes, if you ask them, you might think they have given up on making music. After a long silence, they emerge in Deluziot for a performance that could be the final nail in some coffin, with zero innocence, zero apologies, and zero attempts to pretend they aren’t interested in breaking every inch of our bodies.
DeluZEN: A Contemplative Tour with Lior Pinsky
***more info soon***
