Dror Bahat
The project “Folk Music of Israel” is a folk-like listening event and a form of ritual: a songbook placed on each folding chair, a podium, and a host guiding the audience step by step through a sequence of songs.
At its core, however, the songs have been reworked. I took original recordings from the Zemer Noded archive, some widely known, others more obscure, and placed them into a digital playground: editing, cutting, separating voice, noise, and instrumentation, and extracting residual sounds and frequencies that usually remain in the background.
There are songs we know without remembering when we first encountered them. They live in the body, in language, in intuition, like knowing how to eat, drink, run, or hum.
In archival recordings, beneath their functional surface, traces of collective memory persist. A young woman’s voice, who could now be 120 years old, can suddenly feel immediate and close.
Through practices of estrangement, I try to allow the familiar to re-emerge through a different mode of listening. When a song is heard anew, it opens again: sometimes as a warm and familiar place, and sometimes as something unsettled, unresolved, even resistant.
