Dror Feiler - The Celestial Fire (1991)

Dror Elimelech Feiler (Hebrew: דרור אלימלך פיילר‎; born 31 August 1951) is a Swedish-Israeli musician and artist. Though born in Tel Aviv, Israel, he has been living in Stockholm, Sweden since 1973. Feiler studied new music and its interpretation at the Fylkingen Institut for New Music from 1975 to 1977, musicology at Stockholm University from 1977 to 1978 and composition at the Music Academy of Stockholm from 1978 to 1983.

Feiler's father worked on a kibbutz and met a group of Palestinians in Bucharest in 1986 while it was still illegal and he was also sentenced to prison for it. His 80-year-old mother works with mobile health centrals in Palestinian villages in the West Bank that have no other access to health-care and other services. Feiler served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, but defected in 1973 as one of the first "refuseniks".
Feiler also plays saxophone in the jazz band Lokomotiv Konkret, and founded The Too Much Too Soon Orchestra. In January 2004 he made international news with his artwork Snow White and The Madness of Truth, which was vandalized by then Israeli ambassador to Sweden Zvi Mazel. He is active as a composer of modern music, which includes composition music for symphonic orchestras, opera, chamber music and electro-acoustic music.

Feiler has worked with Merzbow, Frith, Cora, Gustafsson, Tarasov, Karkowski, among others, and in this carefully crafted album one can understand the reason for such a diverse cast of collaborators (...) The opening piece ("Anzats") sounds like a meeting between the likes of Zoviet France and any given improv sax player, with the alto queeks clashing against a dense wall of noise-drones. The same post-industrial aesthetics is pursued in tracks like "Sendero Luminoso", although Feiler's use of the alto sax works its way to lend the piece a more free and unstable course. Tracks like "Hallel", "Sei Yabe" or "Even the Blood Must Sleep" take the listener in a different mood, with solo sax improvisations expanding on what could well be traditional European tunes. There is a sense of melancholy in these pieces, as well as a less in-your-face approach that manages to balance the record and allows the listener to engage in a less breath-taking experience. The album closes with "Umipnei Chatoenu", a track that could be mistaken for a darker piece from one of the early Crawling With Tarts recordings. Its sinister vinyl crackings and loops and the strange nostalgic gloom it evokes in the listener are almost frightening and are the perfect ending for the record, summing up the previous compositions from a (very) different angle. The highlight, however, is "Pig Iron", a brutal noise assault that somehow merges memories of Jazkamer, Merzbow and Napalm Death while being more hypnotic and elusive than these artists ever were. All in all, a very interesting record by Feiler, who in the past few years has taken a different -- and much less interesting -- approach to music making.

Dror Feiler: Saxophones & Electronics
Mixed by Dror Feiler & Raymond King

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