1. The Americanization of Shmuel (20:54) Eli Neuman-Hammond

2. But a storm is blowing from Paradise (19:45) Ella Heron and Eli Neuman-Hammond

The Americanization of Shmuel is a polyphonic, multilingual map of songs, places, movements, and assimilation. There are recorded fragments, flotsam and debris left in the angel of history‘s wake. And then there is the noise, an implacable wind, 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 wind ebbs and flows, shifting and eroding syllables and dividing the piece into 18 parts – numerologically the Hebrew word חי or "life", made up of the letters Chet (ח) and Yud (י).

There are three narratives that weave through the piece. The first to appear concerns an intergenerational family. They sing and listen together, trying to remember lullabies. Some of these songs have been reproduced through generations of singing, some of them are lost, or teetering on the edge of memory. They sing and speak a variety of languages – Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, English, Arabic, Hebrew.

In the second narrative a piano melody undergoes transformations and permutations. The melody was originally written for the 1964 anti-war comedy “The Americanization of Emily,” and then arranged and popularized by Jazz pianist Bill Evans. These recordings are made in an artist’s studio, where you can hear the artist manipulating a computer that processes and “mis-remembers” the melody using a simple markov chain patch.

The third narrative is about an old man, Sam or “Shmuel,” recollecting moments in his life from before and after World War II. He speaks English with an old voice and a thick accent. In 1944 he was deported from the Carpathian mountains to the concentration camp Auschwitz where his four siblings, parents, and grandparents were killed. Sam and his brother escaped in 1945, after which both were mistakenly taken by the Soviet army as prisoners of war and imprisoned for two months. They narrowly escaped exile to Siberia. From there he and his brother briefly returned to their village in the mountains, which was unrecognizable, and then smuggled themselves into mandatory Palestine via Britain’s Jewish Brigade, before eventually immigrating to Barranquilla, Colombia, then to Newark, New Jersey, and finally to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he has lived most of his life in diaspora and where he raised his three daughters, one of which is the artist’s mother.

But a storm is blowing from Paradise refigures the structure of the first piece as a score and duet with saxophonist Ella Heron. Where the first piece looks at social modes of transmission, the second piece platforms improvised music’s mystical, telepathic relation to history and the sacred. The theme common to both sides of the record is how private cultures of transmission resist nationalistic monopolies on space, narrative, and history.

The Americanization of Shmuel - mp3 sample

But a storm is blowing from Paradise - mp3 sample