Words by David C. Obenour
We allow music certain spaces in our life. When driving. When working. When out with others. When attending a live performance. For every space that music occupies though, the boundaries are generally understood and established. The role and our experience is predictable.
Maya Shenfeld is interested in exploring in and outside of these spaces. How a performance is experienced. What sounds can be translated as classical. What instruments sound futuristic and how that same tone can simultaneously look towards our past. While this may sound highly conceptual, the experience is grounded in the visceral. Taking learning and theories and bringing them to engagement. In Free Fall is an album about finding your bearings while exploring your disorientation.
OS: Admittedly, sound installations are something I’m rather ignorant of – I was wondering if you could briefly introduce some of your background there – what first drew you to the field and how you approach creating work in these physical spaces?
MS: I became interested in alternative ways of experiencing and presenting music and sound while studying composition in my early twenties in Berlin. The majority of my friends were studying visual art, and some of them already presented work in galleries and various art spaces. Over time the differences between the way the audience experiences work that’s presented in an art context, and the traditional programmed ninety-minute concert or three-hour opera became apparent to me. I appreciated the way the audience gets to experience an art piece in their own time and for the duration of their liking, and that they can also return and listen to a piece repeatedly or walk around, and was interested in exploring fluid ways for presenting and performing music and sound.
At the same time, I was very much into the work of composers such as Jennifer Walshe, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Julius Eastman, Morton Feldman, Christina Kubish, Le Monte Young, and others–– all compose very different music but belong to a lineage of composers exploring duration, alternative tuning systems, and sound. A performance of Feldman’s three-hour string quartet at an abandoned power plant in Berlin, and a visit to Le Monte Young’s dream house in the outskirts of Munich are just two examples of experiences that motivated me to explore this direction and at times think more conceptually.
I started very DIY, one of the first multichannel installations I worked on “Entangled Dimensions’” consisted of a network of tiny Bluetooth speakers for a small off-space in Birmingham. The following summer I worked on a much larger installation for the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, in collaboration with sound artist Gabriel Dernbach and Daisuke Ishida, which was for 16 channels. Some of the projects were about presenting a music performance in an unusual space. A highlight for me was producing and leading a performance of Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla by an ensemble of 16 women playing guitar and bass on the top floor of an abandoned skyscraper at the heart of Kreuzberg Berlin. The recording from which Mountain Larkspur – one of the record’s singles – was made, is actually a phone recording of a piece I wrote for a youth’s choir which was performed in a 1900 abandoned swimming pool here in Berlin.
Working in this way opened many possibilities and invited me to engage with composition differently. I’m interested in the possibility of composing work that doesn’t necessarily have a clear beginning or end, where people can move around so that listeners are invited to discover something new with each encounter.
OS: Has the pandemic and its central focus on distancing and isolation changed any of how you think of sound installations? More of a consideration of the physical space between us and the air, and space, and everything in between?
MS: At the beginning of the pandemic, I think we were all trying to find alternative online formats for performing music. Most of the projects I had lined up for summer 2020 were either canceled or turned into radio plays, podcasts, streaming events. And since then, to be honest, I haven’t had much of a chance to think and plan an installation for a public space.
I’m currently developing a new installation for Room 25 –– a small room dedicated to sound art on a rooftop at the centre of Tel Aviv. With little to no live concerts, spending time in this room this spring reminded me how important it is to experience sound and music in different spaces. Having a dedicated space for that and setting time aside feels like the right antidote to the amount of time I spend online.
OS: How do you think your work in sound installations has adapted or informed your composing and thinking of music for being consumed in more traditional spaces as with In Free Fall?
MS: There was definitely a different side to working this way. The productions were often very large in scale, could only be played once or twice and were difficult to restage without institutional support. Over time, I became interested in exploring a different medium: what would happen if I started working on music that would have a “longer life span”? This is partly what motivated me to work towards my first album.
Listening to an album at home or when a song is broadcasted on the radio can be a very intimate and personal listening experience, and I’m excited about being able to finally share my music this way. I’m really glad that the recording of the youth choir is part of the record, connecting between these different ways of working. And I guess I don’t really draw a line between one way of producing or the other, at the end of the day it’s all music and sound, and somehow each work in the past is a learning experience and, in a strange way, also a part of new work and way of thinking.
OS: What unique considerations do you have when working on an album?
MS: I see the album as an artwork in and of itself, and it was important for me that, like the structure of a novel or a film, the tracks will create a narrative together, an overarching structure. At times it flowed and made total sense, but other times, I felt like I was groping in the dark, looking for hints as to what this album was about. There was a moment in the fall of 2020, in which I realized the material was there, and I was able to zoom-out, and see that by sequencing the compositions around a ring structure I would be able to tell the story of In Free Fall: one of descent (Cataphora) and ascent (Anaphora).
OS: How does and doesn’t that all relate in terms of considering a live performance of the music of In Free Fall?
MS: In a sense, I’m just glad the music’s there. And now it feels like a point of departure from which I can expand for live shows. I might play just a couple of the pieces and create transitional sections that allow for more live improvisation, and at times I might play the music closely to the way it’s recorded.
OS: With so many varied creative avenues that you pursue in music, what thinking did you put into the sound you wanted to embody for your solo album debut?
MS: Cataphora, which serves as an overture for this series, was the first track I composed. I’m not sure why, but from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write for brass, analogue synths, and feedback/noise guitar. And so, once Cataphora was recorded and produced it seemed to have set the tone for the series. I love that the guitar is a part of the sound but isn’t central and the sound of the MC202 is absolutely heartbreaking. There’s something about working with analogue synths, that is about the future sound of the past – the 80s – but then again still sounds like the future, which has been inspiring to play with.
OS: You also talk about playing in a punk band as bringing about a change to how you think of your classical training and background – adding an urgency, immediacy and physical sensation. How are these new ways of thinking present in the music you composed for In Free Fall?
MS: I think it’s difficult to point out one specific sound, moment, or element that encompasses that sort of feeling or approach. In a sense, I often felt limited by the traditional role ascribed to the performer in classical music. Playing with bands, writing together, jamming, opened something in me, allowed me to rediscover the joy and spontaneity in the process of music-making. It was very much about embracing collaboration, chance, imperfection, and fierceness. A most welcome and freeing antidote to the sober fluorescent-lit recital halls of my classical education, and the aspiration towards an almost mechanical perfection they epitomized for me. I feel like these experiences amplified my artistic “voice”, which the hierarchical and patriarchal classical music institutional environment had obscured. I never stopped loving classical music though, and I feel that through working on this album I went through a process of reconciliation with my classical past.
OS: Your new album is named after an essay from German filmmaker and visual artist, Hito Steyerl. Can you talk about the relevancy of that connection and how you drew that name for your album?
MS: I named my album In Free Fall to describe the sensation of falling, floating, shifting perspective, in other words, losing grasp, or any sense of a stable horizon. The title is inspired by Steyerl’s essay of the same title, whose starting point is a sense of groundlessness ascribed to the present moment by contemporary philosophers. She writes “As you are falling, your sense of orientation may start to play additional tricks on you. The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries. […] This disorientation is partly due to the loss of a stable horizon. And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity. In falling, the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose.”
Hito’s essay was published in 2011, but the opening paragraphs felt as relevant as ever in spring 2020, while I was recording the last pieces for my album. Something about this feeling of being “in free fall” rings true with the bodily and emotional experiences I’ve had producing, performing, and listening back to this music. I think I’ve always been taken by the way music can seemingly stretch, bend, and even break time, its ability to touch something in you, emotionally, and the fact that it’s a resolutely physical experience.
OS: How defining do you see that sound for the work you hope to release in the future under your own name? Is there any thought of limitations or consideration for gradual evolutions throughout albums?
MS: There’s something that feels right about the balance between classical compositional approaches – orchestration, form, counterpoint – drone, experimentalism, and free form exploration in this series. And so I’d be keen to keep on exploring this mode of work, merging “traditional” compositional approaches with the legacies of underground experimentalism. But it’s important for me to not let this first substantial release set constraints, limitations – and I know it can be hard – for sonic avenues I might like to explore in the future – maybe, just like while free-falling, one has to learn also to let go.