Mise en Scene: Shay Nassi's White_Line duet with Heribert Friedl

December 29th 2008, by Tobias |

Tel-Aviv based experimental Sound Artists Shay Nassi aka “Mise en Scene” has teamed up with Austrian mainstay Heribert Friedl for a collaborative work on the White_Line label dedicated to musical Minimalism. Released on a stylish 8cm CD-R and comprising of one track per person (Heribert Friedl – “L.W.H”, Mise En Scene – “External Objects”), the album is part of the “Archisonics” series curated by White_Line’s Baz Nichols to establish a “critical discourse concerning the relationship between sound and architecture” (as befriended artist John Kannenberg put it) as seen through the eyes of respected colleagues. “Archisonics” is set to close in February of next year with yet another beautifully designed 100 copy-edition of a split between Andy Graydon and Richard Garet, but the latest installment by Nassi and Friedl should keep fans of microtonal music happy for some time to come. “Both artists take diametrically opposite approaches”, Nichols observed, “with Friedl using time-based contact mic recordings of his studio walls, creating brittle, textural layerings, whilst Mise En Scene’s Shay Nassi interprets the architecture of his home territory in sound.”

After building a more than promising career start thanks to a connection with Swiss label leerraum, who published his first two works on multichannel DVDs, Shay Nassi now seems to be headed for wider recognition. Equipped with a style owing as much to the delicate material treatments of minimalism and the lower case movement as it does to the more pensive side of Noise, he has quickly stolen the hearts of all those to whom the former was too academic and the latter appeared overly brute and primitive. Drones and White Noise enter an erotically tinged liasion dangereuse on his tracks, which are marked by a great sense of spatial control, instrumental delicacy and arrangement-related sensibility.

It will be interesting to see whether the collaboration will result in a Mise en Scene full-length on Heribert Friedl’s NVO label. Previous acts to be highlighted in the White_line catalogue, such as Luigi Turra, have made simultaneous appearances on the Viense imprint, after all.

Homepage: Mise en Scene / Shay Nassi
Homepage: White_Line label