| “The Frogs” is our most recent project. It is the second installment in the “Fauna” series coming step after “…for electronics and birds” (to be released at May'2003 by Stateart records). As it says in the title this album is dedicated to the frogs and represent our collaboration with singer Victoria Hanna.
We met Victoria, amazing vocal artist from Jerusalem, a couple of years ago and from the very first time it was obvious for us that we'll do something together. We played several concerts of chants vs. electronics in Israel and USA. One day Victoria sent us a tape with her vocal improvisations that she has recorded using some of our casual live recordings as a playback. She wrote: “Do with that what ever you want”. So we did.
We decided to create a totally new piece from this material. We used a lot of different techniques: from field environmental recordings to live electronics, from electroacoustics to pure synthesizer music, from free noise improvisation to endless drones. There were no compositional or conceptual limits except one thing: we tried to reconstruct that amazing feeling of infinite astonishment that probably Tutuola's palm-wine drinkard felt traveling to the town of ghosts. Something we felt every time we got together with Victoria and started to produce sounds.
In the same time one can consider album as an audio book about The Frogs, their friends – the forest and the clouds, their women, their fears and their feats.
We would also like to mention and greatly thank our other collaborators:
Vadim Gusis aka Chaos As Shelter and Igor Krutogolov aka Igor18.
"The music presented here is a carefully unfolding organic adventure with its background and foreground merging into a single entity, making each listening equivalent to a trip in wild nature, ranging from the tribal and eerie to the meditative and relaxing, and with so much finesse that it can only be partially absorbed on each trip; hence, remaining fresh with every listen... Frogs is one of the most articulate electronica offerings I have ever heard, and a must have for anyone with even a mild interest in avant-garde electronica that is completely free of commercial considerations."
( Avi Shaked, «Maelstrom Zine», #33, May 2005) |