The Americanization of Shmuel - mp3 sample

A family sings and listens together, trying to remember lullabies--lost, teetering on the edge of memory. An old man recollects moments in his life from before and after World War II. The wind ebbs and flows, shifting and eroding syllables. An artist plays with time in his studio.

The Americanization of Shmuel is a historical sound work trying to make small bits of meaning from the debris that the angel of history leaves in its wake. It’s a polyphonic, multilingual map of songs, places, movements, and assimilation, made in eighteen sections. There are two parts which alternate and overlap. The first part is noise. It’s sometimes wind, sometimes an inverted floor, at times the tide, a valley, snow, sleep - and always a screen, which both masks and becomes a surface of projection. The other part is made of recorded fragments.

1. let’s listen
2. but a storm is blowing from paradise
3. emily (1)
4. I must have sung that every night for eight years
5. you were really in the mountains
6. and she had a beautiful voice, too
7. emily (2)
8. that’s the only picture I have of her and that’s exactly how i remember it
9. san juan
10. but you remember. It's natural to forget.
11. emily (3)
12. when you were together, he said that, to you?
13. earth
14. emily (4)
15. I used to sing this song in the shower
16. ershter vi tragedye demolt vi fars
17. snow
18. doykayt

"I recognize the mountains." - mp3 sample

"I recognize the mountains." is on the one hand a version of the sh'ma for prepared piano and on the other hand an impressionistic portrait of two voices marked by the twentieth century.