MECHANIQUE(S): FENESTRAE
Nachtstück Records, recorded 2009, released 2019. Total Time: 51 Minutes. Dafna Naphtali - electronics, voice, Hans Tammen - Endangered Guitar, Zachary Seldess - visual processing (for the audio release cover art only).
Mechanique(s) is the New York-based duo of Dafna Naphtali and Hans Tammen -- live computer-based electronics and audio processing, endangered guitar and voice. In their active collaboration since 1998, the duo probes and playfully undermines the overlap of various elements of their technical and aesthetic practices. With Naphtali's interactive processed sound/noise system and 4-octave vocal range, and Tammen's mechanical and energetic laptop manipulations of modified guitars, the duo sets out on a crazed collision course of the acoustic and the electronic – all along the route paying homage (in a twirl of the radio dial) to music concrete, free jazz and European improvised music, as well as the contemporary classical and all manner of non-Western musics.
This album is a live recording of a performance in Schenectady, NY in 2009. Zachary Seldess provided the live visuals processing, an image of which is used for the album design.
Dragoș Rusu / The Attic Staff Picks
“...an intriguing piece of free jazz and European improvised music, not to be missed” (The Attic Staff Picks).
Dave Jackson / A Jazz Noise
Fenestrae #1 appears in Dave Jckson’s picks for 2020. (A Jazz Noise)
Margarida Azevedo / Dizsonancia
Fenestrae takes me quickly to a deep dark setting. But it is the subjectivity of interpretations that makes this record part of my Best off 2019. The vocalizes lead me to an intimist and overwhelming underworld. And when you hear it in your living room and the sound makes your daughter of a year and a half want to paint a canva it is a sign that something on this album awakened in her the desire to do what she sees her mother do. The result is much better than mine (image at the end of the text). It is the most genuine and pure you can have. This record speaks with my senses, and spoke with hers, and from the first minute I heard it I knew I wanted to write about it.
The second track takes me briefly to spirituality but I quickly get lost in labyrinthine corridors in a claustrophobic basement where power and submission games are perpetuated. The scenarios are so varied that it is necessary to breathe between tracks so that the mind can be calmed again. Rich and accurate. Dirty and immoral. I could go on and describe what I hear that way. In two words.
The sensations blend together as fast as the paint on the canvas and on the brush that my daughter has on her hands. There is not a single moment that makes us stop the mind. It's a game. A game in which we are the pawns of our senses. And if for almost an hour it is easy to go into hypnosis mode, the difficult thing is not wanting to hear the record again from one end to the other.
It was recorded in 2009 in New York, and released in February 2019 and worth the ten years of waiting. Every year, every month and every day! It is a vortex that puts the neurons half shuffled and, moment after moment, involves us deeper in the world of Dafna Naphtali and Hans Tammen.
And it's in track three that the brush runs faster in my daughter's hands and the color mix becomes chaotic. But it is in the agitation of the almost nine minutes of track six that the climax of the record happens. The Dafna Naphtali becomes, with this record, a sound member of my family. Nine tracks, almost an hour, from a fantastic record!
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