July 30 Tue8 p.m. @Kleine Synagoge
Waxband
From real life to wax cylinders and back again
Admission: 20 € / 11 €
>> Tickets online

This soulful and inspiring project brings together early ethnographic recording technology and contemporary Klezmer performance practice, blurring the distinction between the old and the new. The advent of recording and copying technology around the year 1900 posed new, fundamental questions for creative artists regarding the relationship between original and copy, artwork and recorded material. Today, in the age of digitization, the Internet, Commons and OpenSource, these questions have become relevant once again. In this dramatic, theatrical evening, a group of artists led by Amit Weisberger, a prolific protagonist of Yiddish music in France, takes us back to where it all began, evoking the shocks and upheavals to which ethnographic recordings at the beginning of the 20th century - and digitized art today - have led. The special guest of the evening is an original Edison phonograph, which will evoke for us ​​the analogue sound world of early recording technology - and the astonishment singers and instrumentalists must have felt when hearing their voices emerge from the wax cylinder for the first time. Until now, many of these ethnographic recordings have languished in archives, waiting for the opportunity to bring a concert hall to life – which they will do in this special evening of music, technology, theater, history and humor.

Line up:

Amit Weisberger (IL/F) - artistic director, voice, violin
Jérôme Block (F) - accordion
Mihaï Trestian (MD/F) - cymbalom
Laurent Clouet (F) - clarinet
Olivier Richaume (F) - violin
an original Edison phonograph

Photo: Shendl Copitman, Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Photograf: Carsten Neubert (Label)