Dror Feiler and Gunilla Skoeld:
My music is a flow of sounds, noises, forces, it develops to a point where it goes beyond itself. The speed with which different sound elements follow each other, and the density with which they superimpose vertically, are so great that a sort of overload occurs, one which transcends the restlessness of arousal, like a film run through at a too hight speed.
The occasional passages with tones, harmonies and sounds in a more "normal" rate can, in context, seem almost banal- a measure of the distance we have travelled in the music. The intuitive molten metal brutality of the music brings the player into the energy of a hot improvisation. A new music is created, a new speed of thinking and feeling where the intellect meets the manic raver. We experience an energy born of rapid movement, sound, noise, flow and expression. The music does something palpable to its listeners, or at least incites them to a form of action, of awakening.
The most immediate audible characteristic of my music is its noisiness.
Abrasive, loud, fast.
The textures and rhythms are never sweet or satisfying in the
conventional sense; one has only to hear the primal screams of
Pig iron (The celestial fire CD/ANKARSTRÖM-Ö10 (Dror
Feiler Solo) for tenor saxophone & live electronics)), the
punk-free improvised thrash of Tio Stupor (Saxophone con forza
PSCD 81 (for alto saxophone & live electronics)) or the new
composition Ember (for symphonic orchestra & electronics (1997
Donau Eschingen festival commission) to realize that neither a
pathetic World music prettiness, a pretentious new romantic resolution,
nor new music academism has any place in those work of music,
except as an antagonistic element. Nor do these compositions allow
the conventions of modern and contemporary music unproblematically.
My music uses "noise" that is "noise in itself;
but noise, in this connotation, is not simply a haphazard or natural
sound, the audible "background" that encroaches on a
work such as Cage's 4'33, as the audience is forced by the tacit
piano to listen to its own shufflings, or to the urban soundscapes
that emerge through an open window. It is a noise that is always
impure, tainted, derivative and, in the Romantic sense of the
term, beautiful like in Alka, OpFor & DiaMat ((FYCD 1007)
By the Too Much
Too Soon Orchestra).
Noise, in the widest possible sense, is one of the central elements in my music as for its more popular "musical cousin" the Noise music. The abrasive raucousness in the music is an attempt to alter how people hear.
Noise, as sound out of its familiar context, is confrontational, affective and transformative. It has shock value, and defamiliarizes the listener who expects from music an easy fluency, a secure familiarity (it can be a "modern" one), or any sort of mollification. Noise, that is, politicizes the aural environment.
The music is difficult in the sense that Adorno finds Schoenberg's music difficult-not because it is pretentious or obscure, but because the music demands from the very beginning active and concentrated listening, the most acute attention to simultaneous multiplicity of movement, forces and expression, the renunciation of the customary crutches of listening which always knows what to expect and the intensive perception of the unique, the specific and the general. The more the music gives to listeners, the less it offers them. It requires the listener spontaneously to compose its inner movement and demands of him not mere contemplation but praxis.
Dror Feiler, Stockholm, February 1998
THE BRUTAL SENTIMENTAL
CONCEPT
Chaos & Composition
Recent theories of Chaos come from scientists with an interest in the real time, messy processes that we witness in our everyday World. Composition together with improvisation, perhaps can be seen as the celebration of music making: the putting together and pulling apart of the bits and pieces of sound which are the expression of living musicians working in real time.
This desire for understanding of chaotic processes as a part of the composition work is hardly 20 years old: Free Improvisation, as an accepted recognizable genre in Western Music, is not much older. Philosophically, they have a lot in common - ideas of self-similarity, attractors, butterfly affects and noise seem useful models in the discussion of both areas. What's more, with the development in music of interactive computer technology, practical application of chaos theories in Composition and improvisation have become a reality - a vast and fruitful area for discovery. Improvisation of course doesn't need any theoretical basis - it exists because musicians have a need to do it (as in all 'musicians' orientated music).
But context is probably the most interesting variable in contemporary music and the process of improvisation is appearing and renewing itself in a whole kaleidoscope of new contexts. Western classical music (mostly European) represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures and it works as an extremely slow feedbackloop.
Being born in Israel in Asia what can I possibly do with the European sentence? With the climax? With the motif? With the development? What is orchestration? What is a solo? Being born in Israel in Asia I instinctively wanted to write and play music free from the European musics burden. Every composer and musician must examine these questions especially Non - European composers and musicians. One must start from scratch and in particular, cast aside the burden of the European tradition : the principles of development, climax, dynamics and orchestration.
Many of the composers that are still working with traditional means of notation and instrumentation are often victims of an closed end, nonimprovisational and nonempirical music system. In trying to avoid this kind of traps I am working on a more organic / alive music creating process by attempting to "unlock" the preconcieved ideas about sound, mix different musical expressions and let all these things float in one piece of music. Nearly everything that's makes music alive comes from conflicts in the music or in the listeners ear or expectations. So in the last years I am working with the collision of Western (counterpoint/ vertical) tradition with other traditions like Asian (texture / linear) styles. I do it by putting together orchestras or groups with musicians from different traditions (classical, improvisation, noise, electroacustic) and have them execute together a set of rules in time.
Everybody in the orchestra gets a set of rules and a time table to execute, these rules are not algorhytmic closed systems but rather open heuretic patterns (they are often just executions of purely physical tasks so that the orchestra doesn't play the piece, they work themselves through the piece), meaning that they determine only general direction of the sound events (small details are allowed to just happen and freely develope creating the overall mixture of independence and interdependence and oscillation between them).
My BRUTAL SENTIMENTAL CONCEPT is an attempt to look at improvisation and composition through the contexts of Chaos and Melody. In my BRUTAL SENTIMENTAL CONCEPT a composition / improvisation will spotlight three very different views of Chaos. So far, science has concerned itself primarily with 'orderly' areas in which causes and effects stood in direct connection to each other (Western music, Jazz and Rock music is going generally the same way) - if one opens the faucet just a little, it starts to drip; opening it all the way lets the water shoot out. If an event was too complex to understand, one divided it to the point at which an unambiguous mechanism could be captured in an equation; by coupling these equations together, the whole event then became calculable and foretellable.
Through the use of computers to deal with ever-more complex
systems, it became increasingly clear that these preconditions
only exists in special cases; they are, so to speak, the islands
of order in a sea of chaos. Here, the smallest causes can lead
to huge changes - the so called butterfly effect describes the
situation that the beat of a butterfly's wing in Arkansas can
lead to a snowstorm in Siberia. Long-range weather forecasting
will thus - even using ever-larger computers - remain impossible
forever.
But chaos is not arbitrary disorder - in contrast to this, it
is based on mathematically precisely defined causes, and thus
it always carries the seed of order within itself. Surprisingly,
in the transition from chaos to order, images can arise whose
aesthetics are more reminiscent of intoxicated visions than of
the depictions of mathematical systems.
One must start from scratch and in particular, cast aside the burden of the European tradition: the principles of development, climax, dynamics and orchestration. The only criterion is: does this work try to deal with the the great questions - here and now.
Dror Feiler -1997
About my music, Che Guevara and the Revolution
Che Guevara made the choice to dedicate and than sacrifice his own life to a revolution. A last inaccessible event that mostly leaves the survivors only with traces of desperation and loneliness. And yet it is this last absolutely unique choice that allowed him to become his own and from one moment to another, left us only with the power that is found in his work. Perhaps it was not the kind of suicide which Foucault spoke of as an act which should be thought about, that illuminates life, but more the radical refusal to give up the realistic dream of the revolution ...
Che himself thought of life, the energies that life releases within itself and the act of forcing the struggle, as a great experiment to overcome the possibilities of existence and the ways of life which one is a prisoner in. Life is more and even beyond than the biological force, in every moment it should create new constructions by opening the lines of resistance. Just as life is the discovery of the new and setting itself free of the self to be able to think of the new, so must music draw vanishing lines, withdraw from the mechanisms of being shut in, avoid the permanent control and hyper-information.
As part of the modern capitalist society music is in danger
of perishing in
random samples, data, markets, instrumentation patterns, institutions
and
computer nets, or of suffocating in the gigantic tautological
machinery of
the media industry, that continuously sends back the opinions
of the masses,
that they, as media, formulated.
The music of the NEW AVANT-GARDE, is the differential, that
neither
compromises or thinks of surrender, but carries on even in the
shadow and
disguise like the guerilla fighters and draws active disappearing
lines in
the fields of society.
The music of the NEW AVANT-GARDE is a labyrinth, a rich ensemble
of
relations; diversity, heterogeneity, breaks, unexpected links
and long
monotonies. It is the vision of a life that opens the ways and
allows the
horizon of resistance to light up. The right to life, the right
to power for
all.
In my music I want always to deal with the grim problems in
life: Shrapnel
(war); Beat the White the red wedge (Revolution); Schlafbrand
(Second World
War); Let the Millionaires go Naked (Revenge of the poor); Intifada
(Israeli-Palestinian conflict); Ember (the anti imperialistic
struggle).
Aesthetics per se does not interest me. More than that, it is
dangerous.
When I compose or play, I do not look for beauty, but for truth.
I often
depict, fortissimo and at great length; a violent struggle is
heard but as
in Maavak (struggle) the composition does not describe the struggle
it is
the struggle itself.
Whenever I dedicate a composition or write IN MEMORIAM, i.e.
Che Guevara in
Ember, the palestinian peoples struggle in Intifada and the foreign
workers
in Europe in Gola', it is not so much a question of an inspirational
motif
or a nostalgic memory, but on the contrary, of a becoming that
is
confronting its own danger, even taking a fall in order to rise
again: a
becoming as far as it is the content of the music itself, and
it continues
to the point of end... Becoming, so that the music goes beyond
itself.
Dror Feiler, Stockholm Februar 1998