Maya Shenfeld’s expansive, kaleidoscopic music is as illuminating as it is exquisite. Classically trained, Shenfeld has fast grown into one of contemporary music’s most exciting, vital voices. Every aspect of her dazzling, multifaceted output interrogates the way we experience the world around us – be it solo microtonal explorations, site-specifc installations or commissions for leading New Music ensembles. Shenfeld balances orchestral ambition and compositional rigor with the joy of noise, and granular detail.
Under the Sun provides a daring expansion of that musical vision, a series of pieces exploring change and repetition, deep time and the ephemeral moment, equilibrium and imminent threat. Composed and produced between a studio in Berlin and on site at one of the world’s deepest marble quarries in Portugal, the album’s powerful sounds are a meditation on the natural world, wrestling with the looming threat of catastrophe and crisis, and the power of community and collaboration to enact change.
Our environment is more than just an abstract theme, it is interwoven into Under The Sun’s very sonic DNA. Field recordings taken deep within the still-active quarry in Portugal were recorded, quite literally, under the scorching sun on one of the hottest days on record in the country. Shenfeld extracted sounds from this scarred, deeply mined landscape, and threaded these samples into rich arrangements of synthesizers and acoustic instruments.
The atmospheres of Under the Sun evoke that push and pull through an eclectic and rich sonic palette, from the sacred sounds of the organ at St Matthew’s Church, to the ethereal voices of the Ritter Youthchoir conducted by AnnKristin Mayr. Refections of her punk and electronic forays bubble up in a collaborative composition with Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, summoning raw, primal energy. Under the Sun encourages us to explore how we relate to our environment.
Shenfeld’s slowly evolving, hypnotic pieces make canny use of repetition, space and silence to play with our very sense of time and our relationship to our surroundings. A deep listening that enables us to better attune our ears to the world around us, championing collective listening and collaboration as a force for change.