Sadness

Sadness examines the way in which trauma keeps resonating beyond the threshold of death. It takes the form of an album, a publication and a live show.

It began with a ghost video found online: a recital given by an eighteen year old kid, less than a year before he was killed as a rookie soldier, playing the mandocello with his mother at the piano, at the conservatory in Ashdod. The Bach cantata from which he played is called Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe, "I am standing with one foot in the grave". Listening to the dead man play, a tragic ghost plucking a slightly comic instrument and unknowingly foretelling his own early, unheroic death in what seems like an endless violent conflict, opened a space that "sadness" only begins to name.

Recorded sound has been bound up with death since its invention. Thomas Edison proposed that the phonograph could preserve the last words of the dying, and late in life he tried to make it a "spirit phone" for speaking with the dead. Air frozen into a groove has always carried a longing to know what lies beyond the grave.

The two artists approached this space through a chain of transformations traced by philosopher Timothy Morton: within melancholy there is sadness, within sadness beauty, within beauty longing, within longing joy, and laughter within tragedy, thus comedy appears as the genre of coexistence. Over years of conversation, paintings, objects, musical sketches and images gathered around one attempt: to activate this tragicomic space together, and to listen to death deeply without looking away.

The album is a musical fable in four parts. King Fear, widowed by his queen Reverence, is looking for a new partner. He accepts Death the persuer, until Isaac, the son who laughs, joins them as a third king. Around the fable are songs and pieces by Shai-Li Hordi and Power Strangers, two settings of the arioso from Bach's Cantata 156, and, as a closing track, Standing with One Foot in the Grave (2020).