James Ginzburg & Yair Elazar Glotman

The authors of the mix are James Ginzburg of Emptyset and Yair Elazar Glotman, also known as Ketev. They are Berlin based sound artists who joined forces to compose and record some beautiful, yet strangely involving cathedral music. To mark their new collaborative release on Subtext, the duo prepared an intimate and influential mix, which smoothly connects mostly live recorded thrilling musical pieces.

STM 134 is a deeply emotive and harmonious audio voyage through the beauty of vital drones flittering in the spacious and expressive architectural domes. The mix combines 16 cinematic records that were originally composed in the last 4 decades. James Ginzburg & Yair Glotman compiled this mix as a fictional retrospective mood board to accompany the release of their soundtrack to Joanie Lemercier & James Ginzburg’s 360 degree film “Nimbes”. The mix is comprised of pieces that have inspired the pair as well as pieces that they introduced to each other in the process of working on this project from conception to recording to release.

Records and connections

The “Nimbes” soundtrack itself, realised within the vast interior of Berlin’s Kraftwerk power station, employs the cavernous reverb of the space in response to the video’s encompassing narrative of scale, time and entropy. Centred around the use of contrabass and elemental percussion, the stark rendering of instrumental sound crafts an evocative portrait of this former industrial site, mapping an overarching texture onto the underlying acoustic compositions. The project draws parallels to Ginzburg’s sonic spatial explorations in Emptyset alongside Glotman’s own forensic examinations of rhythm and tonality initiated through his work as Ketev, bringing the two into a formal dialogue through techniques of acoustic production.