dedicated to Hagar Shahal.

premiered on january 5th, 2022, at Studio Annette, Tel Aviv, as a part of CEME 2022 Festival, organized by Meitar Ensemble.

electronics type: multiple fixed audio tracks, triggered on cue (stereo).

flute: Hagar Shahal.

duration: 5′.

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KLUM TOTALI was inspired by a visit to the abandoned shacks next to the settlement Kalia in the northern dead sea and by the documentary Route 90 (2014). the Jericho valley area has been populated by humans for more than ten thousand years, and has historically been considered a place for solitude. having been to the area a few times I’ve always felt a sense of imposed freeze, as evident by the plenty of abandoned buildings in the area. next to Qasr al-Yahud, the traditional site of the baptism of Jesus, there are multiple abandoned Christian monasteries, that were surrounded by 3,000 mines following an Israeli military order and thus became a closed military area. the northern dead sea factories’ facilities are were abandoned during the 1948 war, along with Kalia hotel. The aforementioned shacks next to settlements were a Jordanian military camp, that were abandoned during the 1967 war. all of these buildings are still standing today, with the exception of the Kalia hotel which naturally collapsed in 2015 and its ruins still stand in place today. the freeze of life caused by war is best exampled by the current state of the city of Jericho, arguably the oldest city in the world, populated for over eleven thousand years. the city is ruled for the last half-a-century by an occupying force, making the city’s residents non-citizens in their own land and denying them basic civil rights. in nearby villages that are considered in C territory the situation is worse, and the populations’ most important human rights are at risk.

my experience of visiting Jericho valley, which this piece attempts to translate to music, was that of unease at first – feeling the unique energy of this place and knowing the controversial status of the land I’m in – slowly turning into weird tranquility. this tranquility is surrendering to the ancient human history of solitude surrounding the Jericho valley for thousands of years.

the player needs to convey the progression between these two specific states as much as they can.

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