Maya Shenfeld: Under the Sun
On being the only girl in an ensemble and the deepest marble quarries on earth
On a grey February afternoon, Maya Shenfeld shows me around her neighborhood, pointing out used book and record stores.
At dusk, we sit down in a wine bar. She orders her drink in German.
The Rote Insel (‘red island’) is a triangular patch of land between several train tracks in Berlin-Schöneberg, home to many artists and the – traditionally left-voting – working class since the 19th century.
The year is 2022, and Maya’s debut album In Free Fall has just received overwhelming reviews in the press, signaling the arrival of an exciting new voice in experimental music. She’s crafted the material over three years while working a day job for music software company Ableton.
In Free Fall doesn’t sound like the debut album of a classically trained guitarist. Her otherworldly compositions revolve around analog synthesizers, brass and voice. One reviewer aptly compares the song “Voyager” to David Bowie’s late 1970s album B-sides. There must be something in the water in Berlin-Schöneberg.
Musically trained at Berlin’s prestigious University of the Arts, Maya worked on commissions and sound installations before starting to write an album.
At one point, she tells me, she performed Julius Eastman’s piece Gay Guerilla with a group of 16 female electric guitarists. “That was an important moment to me. I had played that piece in an ensemble before, and I was the only woman then”, Maya says.
I tell her what I’ve just read in an old interview with Olivia Block about the ‘male gaze’ in academic music. As a young female composer, Block felt she couldn’t understand the benchmarks and parameters of ‘experimental’ music, as they had been developed exclusively by men.
“I was always the only girl”, Maya confirms. “I never had any female role models. Until I came to Berlin, I didn’t even consider ‘composer’ a possible job description for me. But here, I saw young Scandinavian women who as a matter of course called themselves ‘composer’ or ‘sound artist.' That impressed me. Where I come from, nobody spoke about Pauline Oliveros or Éliane Radigue.”
Growing up in Jerusalem as the daughter of a Brasilian man and a Moroccan woman, Maya received musical training from as early as age six. At home her parents were playing sounds from Latin America and the Middle East, while she immersed herself in the local indie scene, listening to punk and trip-hop.
She attended a music school that was known for being strict and conservative. “Picking up an electric guitar would have been considered a huge no-go”, Maya says. “Hopefully it’s different today. Back then, there was no creative freedom.”
When she turned 20, she landed a scholarship to continue her studies in classical guitar in Berlin, later adding new music, composition and performance to her schedule.
It’s not a huge surprise that Maya was quickly drawn to the free forms of experimental music. “Within the realms of classical guitar, I often felt limited. Especially when practicing for an exam, it felt like I was a competitive athlete, not a musician.”
Maya liberated herself by working on her own compositional language, and along the way creating the material that became her debut album. In 2022, she released In Free Fall on long-established indie imprint Thrill Jockey, known for putting out adventurous music from across the genre spectrum.
It’s February 2024 now, and Maya’s second album Under The Sun just got released, again on Thrill Jockey. Right after finishing In Free Fall, she started feeling the urge to expand on its idea of a ‘modern urban symphony’.
In an email to me, Maya writes that she still composes with what she is calling an “old school approach, pencil on paper, thinking about counterpoint and orchestration”, adding that “sonically, I wanted to work with woodwinds, organ, and some new synths I’ve added to my Eurorack.”
During the process, she studied compositional works that make use of just intonation, an ancient alternative tuning system, and played the music of expressive Belgian vocal ensemble Graindelavoix, as well as Leyland Kirby’s haunted ballroom sounds as The Caretaker.
“I’ve also been listening to Surorile Osoianu’s ‘Trece-un nouras pe sus’ and Meryem Aboulafa’s ‘Ya Qalbi’ in a loop – both songs connect me to a ‘Sehnsucht’ to my childhood and Jerusalem. And I often return to Mahler, Brahms, and Wagner, studying their harmonies and polyphonies.”
Speaking about further influences from art and literature, Maya mentions poet and sociologist Zali Gurewitch’s modern interpretation of Ecclesiastes [a book within the Old Testament]. It contains the well-worn proverbial verse ‘there’s nothing new under the sun,’ which inspired the album title.
“The book reflects on life's impermanence and the pursuit of meaning amidst change and uncertainty. Gurewitch’s modern reading resonated with questions I was grappling with, about purpose, our ability – or inability – to shape destiny, and the intricate interplay between time – or entropy – and cyclicality. Though I rarely read the bible, this image of the sun as a force of stability, change, and tension just stuck.”
In a conversation with Pedro Maia, her collaborator on visuals, she mentioned these musical prompts. He then came up with the idea to visit a marble excavation region in the Alentejo region of his native Portugal, an area that holds some of the deepest quarries on earth.
They traveled to Southern Portugal in the summer of 2022. It was the hottest week on record. Climbing down steep, vertigo-inducing ladders, Maya recorded the roaring sounds of the extraction machines.
The field recordings from Portugal naturally found their way into the album material, complementing the studio sounds recorded in Berlin, Maya’s home for the past 14 years.
The German capital’s rich experimental music community has been constantly motivating her to create her best work, she says.
“The short dark days around winter solstice [in Berlin] are tough, but the darkness can also help find focus and an uninterrupted studio time. If I lived in a sunny place, the music and soundscapes I’d be creating would likely be very different.”
For Under The Sun, Maya worked with Berlin’s Ritter Youthchoir again, which had already appeared on In Free Fall. For the track “Mountain Larkspur”, she’d recorded them singing atonal avant-garde works in an abandoned swimming pool.
“They would normally sing pop arrangements and traditional choral music, so this felt quite out of the ordinary for them, though they loved doing it”, Maya recounts. “But after working on very experimental music for a while, such as Pauline Oliveros’ sonic meditations, I felt like I’d like to write them a nice melody to sing.”
The resulting tune, “Analemma,” is the album’s last song – and definitely one of its most gorgeous. “It’s essentially a three-voice canon, mixed with my electronic instruments and synths. The combination of the choir as the voice of the human conscious – sort of like the Greek chorus – and electronic feedback and manipulation resulted in something that to me sounds very unearthly.”
With its timeless, almost liturgical sound, Under The Sun expands on compositional techniques that Maya first outlined on In Free Fall – but also on its wider, underlying philosophical ideas.
On the evening of her album release day, I am visiting her show at Berlin’s silent green venue. The room is packed with art school kids and experimental music lovers on this Friday night, mesmerized by every single second of her set, accompanied by Pedro Maia’s stunning visuals.
One of Maya’s beliefs is that music can act as a catalyst for social change.
“As a way of coming together through an experience, a concert, reflection, meditation, and education, music can be very powerful. Practices like deep listening, which encourage us to slow down, truly listen, and resist the constant stream of social media, dopamine hits, and attention economy, help me ground in ways. Music and art that openly reflect on our relationship to each other or the planet, have the potential to make others slow down and reflect about these topics as well. They can create community around shared passion and values, which is very much needed in a polarized world.”
I'm interested in that Olivia Block interview too. Where could I read it?