Ayelet Lerman / Wade Matthews / Carmel Raz: Growing Carrots in a Concrete Floor

Operating for four years, the em>Wire Tapping series of experimental improvised meetings at the Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem has hosted many ad-hoc initial meetings between left-of-center musicians. The Series organized collaborations in the past with American drummer Gerry Hemingway, German double bass player Alexander Frangenheim and New York-based and Israeli ex-pat guitarist Eyal Maoz.

In March 2012 the series curator, viola player Ayelet Lerman hosted a meeting with American, Madrid-based electronics innovator Wade Matthews and American- Israeli classically-trained composer and violinist Carmel Raz and Lerman herself. The immediate, impatient shaping of a tight continuum of sounds by all three was later edited and released as Growing Carrots in a Concrete Floor.

Matthews transported the analog synthesizer sonic spectrum into his laptop and combined the vintage electronic sounds with various sound parameters and field recordings that allow him to interact with other musicians in real time. Lerman and Raz employ extended bowing techniques that enable both to tap to the delicate, transparent drones and noises produced by Matthews and later to sketch nuanced micro- tonal textures that expand the digital-based sounds to abstract and enigmatic tone poems. As this meeting progresses all three become more daring. The tension between the acoustic stringed instruments and the concrete electronic and field recordings sounds shifts organically between gentle and supportive dialogs and urgent, conflicting sonic collisions. The bows and strings are used on the third and sixth pieces to create fractured percussive sounds that trigger electronic sounds that intensify the intense interplay that culminates in an atmospheric electro-acoustic storms.
,br> This unique trio succeeds to form imaginative coherent pieces, all charged with expressive power and energy.