ABOUT HATZATZ

contribution # 1 | HATZATZ | israeli electro-acoustic musical project | 9, 10 and 11 november 2012

 

GENERATED TIME

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9KfSzoP9jI

if you click the ‘play’-button of ‘relax (in the city life)’, and watch the accompanying videoclip by sonia kazovsky on youtube, you will soon understand, that hatzatz is not an average music ensemble. _on their website, they call themselves: an electro-acoustic project. _the israeli members of this avant-garde quartet apply a set of instruments with an intense penetrating power. _they use these tools to generate hi-energy compositions to open up new dimensions of sound and new layers of perception, and they’re not afraid to use a crowbar, if necessary. _the sound strings that hatzatz produces are unrefined, rough and hectic. _most compositions lack a fixed rhythm or tonal basis. _without exception they result from a anarchistic collaborative process, where the border between composition and improvisation is never clear

| izs | two years ago, i composed ‘modo recordar modo olvidar’, a piece that included a lot of notation and room for improvisation. _we tried it out, but reading from a score felt wrong to us, so we kicked out the notes. _the compositional structure remained, but within that structure, we are free to do whatever we want as long as we don’t limit the freedom of the other players

one of hatzatz’ main goals is to search for innovation and for an experimental, aesthetic idiom, that makes its abstract soundworks more accessible to the wider public. _for that purpose, the members invited the video artist daniel slabosky to reinforce the project with live video. _his contributions are not meant to be a - redundant - illustrative element, but rather serve as a medium that interconnects the realm of sound with a simultaneous visual dimension

video still sipur

| izs | one year ago, maya created ‘sipur’, an electronic text-fragments composition/structure that deals with language. _i consider text as a metaphore for the music, a completion of it. _in this piece, you can hear the sound recording of me, reading a story in hebrew. _maya plays it from her computer. _for a non-hebrew speaking audience the words sound like music. _at a certain moment maya stops the linear narrative process of the speaking. _the sounds are electronically processed and grinded into small grains (it’s not a coincidence that hatzatz is the hebrew word for ‘gravel’) _we played with that material. _we discussed the option to explain the meaning of the spoken words with a projection of the english translation. _i’d rather thought it should be projected in hebrew. _i wanted ‘sipur’ to remain a completely ununderstandable acoustic work for non-hebrew speakers. _why bother to concretize something that is meant to be abstract? _but tomer and maya really wanted the translation. _that was a group decision

in a later piece (no title yet), video plays a more important role. _the starting point are thirty-six fragments that maya cut from a video of a hip-hop dancer

maya's inventory of movements of the hip-hop dancer

| izs | each player is assigned to react to a different part of the dancer’s body. _i chose the legs, tomer the head and maya the hands. _i had to do homework, to study the fragments and really get to know them well enough the react immediately to the dancer’s movements. _i also had to decide which movement on the bass would correspond with his movements. _daniel will cue the video fragments live from his computer. _in this piece he functions as a conductor

when I ask ilya for his motive to compose music, he answers plain and simple

| izs | my motive to make music is actually the practical necessity to keep musicians busy for, for instance, five or ten minutes. _music is a way of gaining time. _it reminds me of the gipsy ensembles that play near the amsterdam central station. _they are good musicians, they play really well. _they sit there and produce new notes, because they NEED to play. _if they stop playing, the music will stop, time stops and passers-by will stop giving them money. _so they generate time by playing. _i don’t mean that in a negative way. _i respect them, because they succeed in making their time interesting. _for me, making music is in essence a necessary way to generate interesting time

hatzatz are: maya felixbrodt (viola/electronics), tomer harari-kaplan (indian harmonium/singing saw/ipod/electronics), ilya ziblat shay (double bass/electronics) and daniel slabosky (live video)