Winter Family

Jerusalem is a very complicated city, beautiful and exhausting, crossed by people from every confession looking for their own little piece of sacred. At the Holy Sepulchre, at the Wailing Wall, on the mosques’ esplanade. People who do not meet. Everything participates in this thrilling but tense climate. As for us, we went there to shoot a Take away show with Israelo-French duet Winter Family.

(Note: every downloadable file gathers the 3 parts of this Take away show)

Ruth Rosenthal (vocals) and Xavier Klaine (harmonium, organ, piano) play a music fed by the city’s strength and power, by the numerous stories it gathers, when you wander in the streets and listen to the thousand sounds floating in the air, the breath of its ardour. It’ll be difficult to forget these moments when, while on the old city’s rooftops, we heard some strange music, mingled with incantations in arab, hebrew and latin, noises from a radio, its rhythm given by sirens and other plane noises. A huge sound collage imposing contemplation. Yet, this quest for simplicity echoes in their music, whose minimalism reveals an absolute faith in the musical gesture. It cannot be missed when you watch these three videos; Ruth’s hands caressing the city, her voice telling all the stories, while Xavier, rooted, changes all the surrouding whispers into a hypnotizing drone, with only one argument : the swipe of his harmonium.

I understand it now. Slowly but surely, with an unspeakable faith and fear in the stomach, to quote ali_fib, it’s a music which contains a certain melancholy for Jerusalem. We couldn’t have been dreaming of three better places for these three Take away shows, for a city three times sacred. The first "Omaha", next to the Tomb of David, then "Abraham" on the old city’s fortifications, in front of Jerusalem. And the last one, after a brief escapade on the Mount of Olives, "Shooting Stars", all of us gathered near a piano. There’s a real pleasure to see Jerusalem filmed differently, and the Take away shows seldom bind a band and his city with so much accuracy than they did in Jerusalem. Vincent Moon seldom went that far in the band’s intention, and not only because he does magic tricks with piano keys.

Winter Family is an Israelo-French duet, consisting of Ruth Rosenthal (vocals, bells) and Xavier Klaine (harmonium, organ, piano). After a first eponymous album on label Sub Rosa, they just released a new record on Marienbad, called Where Did You Go, My Boy ? where you can find the first and third song of that session. They’re currently touring in Europe, and they’ll be playing on June 21st at the Eglise Saint Eustache in Paris.

Antoine V.