By Eyal Hareuveni & Nick Ostrum
Dror Feiler is an Israeli-Swedish experimental composer, reeds player (and a collector of rare and vintage reeds instruments and bells ), and multimedia artist. Feiler, now 72 years old, is also a staunch and vocal, left-wing activist who has been fighting against all forms of fascism and for the Palestinian liberation from the Israeli occupation.
Maavak (מאבק, struggle in Hebrew) is monumental, two-10-cd box sets that summarize more than forty years and seventy concerts and other musical projects by the rarely documented Feiler. Maavak is also the name of the 1970s Israeli Marxist-Leninist group - The Revolutionary Communist Alliance - and its anti-colonialist journal. These limited editions of 300 box sets were released by Feiler’s own Celestial Fire imprint (titled after his debut album, Anckarström, 1991) and by Swedish sound artist Joachim Nordwall’s iDEAL Recordings.
Feiler’s music is intense, urgent and demanding - obviously for the innocent listener but also for the musicians, who are themselves listeners, and is meant to be experienced live. Its raw and physical, transformative and destabilizing power and its politicizing aural environment are organized with the “Brutal Sentimental Concept” and its radical, unifying principle of noise as form. Feiler explains briefly his musical vision in Maavak’s beautiful liner notes: “It is a kind of tapestry woven from contradictory, calculated clouds of sounds and melodies in which each individual expression reflects the absent whole… My intention is for a chaotic, incomplete form to serve as a counterpoint to a positivistic, well-groomed and complete form. (Noise) has shock value, and defamiliarizes the listener who expects from music an easy fluency, a secure familiarity, or any sort of mollification... I place importance on the precision of sounds versus imprecision and the relationship between synchrony and asynchrony. Going from disorder to order in music can be interesting, but going from disorder into a greater disorder interests me even more… The more it 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”.
The box sets are organized by specific instrumentation, orchestration, or themes and offer the rich musical universe of Feiler - works for organ, clarinets and bells, music boxes, noise (mostly performed solo by Feiler), solo saxophones, chamber music and chamber orchestras, violin/s. We focused on a few works of Feiler. Feiler’s brutal noise vision can be experienced in the 54-minute explosive and abrasive, manic and merciless attacks of “Music is Castrated Noise no. 1” (2008) (there are now ten works in this series, for different instrumentations), performed by Feiler and other noise comrades - Tommy Björk (who plays with Feiler in the free jazz unit Lokomotiv Konkret), Tommi Keränen (who plays in Paal Nilssen-Love’s Large Unit), Raymond King, Mats Lindström (who played in Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra), Lasse Marhaug (who meticulously mastered and designed the box sets) and Kasper T Toeplitz.
“L’extension du Domain de la Lutte no. 2” (2022) borrows its title from a novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq and is performed by the Belin-based contemporary ensemble zeitkratzer, directed by Reinhold Friedl, and conducted by Feiler (and released before in zeitkratzer’s noise \ ... [lärm], Tourette, 2002 which offered other works by like-minded composers - Masami Akita a.k.a. Merzbow and Zbigniew Karkowski). This orchestral work introduces noise into contemporary music but in a subversive, primal manner when “the intuitive molten metal brutality of the music brings the player into a new energy, a new music is created, a new speed of thinking and feeling where the intellect meets manic raver”, as Feiler tells.
The short title piece, “Maavak” (1981), is the earliest composition in these box sets and is performed by an ensemble of eight wind players, six double bass players, and six percussionists and stresses the unconventional orchestration of Feiler, with no noise makers, but already then with a strong unsettling and destabilizing sensibility. “Halat Hisar” (2009) (حـالـة حـصـار, state of siege in Arabic, but also the title of a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish) for bass flute prepared piano and symphonic orchestra and performed by the Bayerische Rundfunk Orchestra. This lyrical and powerful composition, with its machine gun-like percussive pulse, relates to the Israeli siege on Gaza Strip. Feiler himself took part in the freedom flotillas to Gaza, was arrested by Israeli security forces and for a few years was even banned from entering Israel.
“Tikkun Olam” (2018) (תִּיקּוּן עוֹלָם in Hebrew, meaning repairing of the world, a concept in Judaism that refers to various forms of action intended to repair and improve the world) was performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov with sax player Mats Gustafsson and Lasse Marhaug and Feiler himself, as noise makers. This dramatic composition, with its strange hissing soundscapes and all-out blasts evoking Edgard Varèse for the twenty-first century, seems to posit the healing of the world as a painful, even violent, process. Honestly, apart from the title, one does not detect much hope or respite. It is unnerving but moving. What is striking is not just the eerie orchestral drone and militaristic imagery that propels “Tikkun Olam”. In the context of the box sets, one is also struck by the myriad ways Feiler explores noise within contemporary composition. It also keeps with Feiler’s own Brutal Sentimental Concept, wherein noise and melody serve as counterpoints to each other to disarm, confuse and engage the listener. Consider me disheartened, bemused and thoroughly entranced.
The last composition in these box sets, “Epexegesis” (2018-19)” demonstrates the relevance of Feiler’s work for our lives, as active, engaged and concerned listeners as well as human beings motivated to make the world better. This composition was written for two soloists - the vocalist Blixa Bargeld (of Einstürzende Neubauten fame) and Feiler on reeds and live electronics - and Stavanger Symphony Orchestra conducted by Volkov and recorded at the Tectonics Festival in Stavanger, Norway. This moving and sad composition, with the charismatic and passionate oratory of Bargeld, adapts a text of Palestinian, Stockholm-based poet Ghayath Almadhoun that captures an imaginary conversation of a dead Palestinian victim, supposedly apologizing for the Israeli sniper who killed him and deconstructing his - and the Western culture - that allowed such a barbaric, senseless act.m
The liner notes of Maavak end with an enlightening quote from French philosopher Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s pamphlet from 1754: “All forms of freedom are interconnected, and are equally dangerous: The freedom of music initiates the freedom of emotions, which in turn initiates the freedom of thoughts, leading to freedom of action, and freedom of action is the state’s number one enemy”.