Winter Family, Composer
CONTRIBUTED TO Les Médusés Yama
Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine met in Jaffa in Israel in 2004. They play a minimal, obsessive and saturate music sometimes described as Weird Wave or Funeral Pop. Ruth psalomodies and chants her texts in Hebrew and English (spokenword), plays drums and machines, Xavier plays harmoniums, piano and pipe organ. Their daughter Saralei sometimes joins them on stage playing machines and flute. Winter Family has released several critically acclaimed albums on the labels Sub Rosa, Alt.vinyl and Ici d’Ailleurs and have done more than 380 concerts in churches, art galleries, museums, clubs, rock halls and squats across the world: China, Japan, Usa, Canada, Israel, Europe.
They have worked with directors (Arthur Nauzyciel, etc.), choreographers (Paco Dècina, Damien Jalet, etc.), filmmakers (Sebastien Betbeder, Blaise Harrisson, Ami Livne, Philippe Petit, etc.) plastic artists (Yochai Matos, Maïder Fortuné, Yael Perlman, Olivier Mirguet, etc) and signed the music for some commercials (Perfume Chanel, EU).
In 2011, extending a radio piece recorded in Jerusalem for Radio France Culture, they created the documentary theater performance ‘Jerusalem Cast Lead – hallucinated trip in an emotional dictatorship’, winner of the ‘Impatience’ festival at the Centquatre in Paris, invited to Avignon Festival then toured internationally for 3 years (Germany, Belgium, Japan, Canada, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Poland). From 2010 to 2012, thanks to Villa Medicis – Hors les Murs scholarships’ program, they resided in the Caribbean neighborhoods of South Brooklyn, New York, and decided to extend their stay in order to write ‘No World / FPLL’ their second documentary theater performance. ‘No World / FPLL’ was created in March 2015 at the ‘Programme Commun’ festival of the Vidy Theater in Lausanne. it was co-produced also by the Centquatre de Paris where Winter Family were associate artists and the Avignon Festival and toured until 2016. This work of self-centered research on the ultra-connected and indignant cultural bourgeoisie gave an occasion to the publication of ‘No World’, a book-cd published by Dis/Voir (Paris). In 2016, together with the video artist Yael Perlman, they created ‘Back to Sodom’, a sound and visual show in the courtyard of the Museum of Jewish Art and History as part of the ‘Nuit Blanche’ in Paris. They then returned to Tel Aviv and recorded their third album ‘South from Here’, released in February 2017, followed by a series of concerts in Europe, Israel and Japan. They realized ‘Celebration’, a massive, savage, illegal and repeated act of installation of Palestinian and Israeli flags together in the streets and on monuments of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in an attempt to banalize the idea of peace in the eyes of ultra militarized Israelis. In 2018, they created “H2 Hebron” their 3rd documentary theater show based on 500 pages of testimonies collected by Winter Family in occupied Palestine. H2 Hebron was co-produced by Vooruit Gent, Vidy-Lausanne, Nanterre-Ameniers, TNB, MC93, CDN Orleans, ABC-La Chaux de Fonds, It is still on tour. Winter Family will release, on February 2021, a vinyl ‘Chevaliers-music for a dance piece by Paco Dècina’ (pipe organ, vocals) on the label Sub Rosa. Currently, they are recording ‘On Beautiful Days ’, their fourth album, between Paris and Maxéville and working on ‘Patriarcat’ their new documentary theater show.