About

I am a Sonic Fundamentalist.

Eran Sachs works as composer, improviser, sound-artist and curator in Jerusalem and Jaffa. Originally coming from a classical background, he turned his attention towards Metal and contemporary music, and started performing at the age of 14, most notably with his band Incarnation.

Currently, Sachs is a member of the International Hyperion Ensemble, alongside musicians such as reeds-man Tim Hodgkinson, guitarist Stephen O’Malley and percussionists Chris Cutler and Steve Noble. Hyperion is an ensemble which revolves around the pioneering works of the Romanian spectral composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram. Sachs’ own compositions have also been performed by the Hyperion Ensemble.

Along with sound poet Alex Drool, Sachs is the co-curator of “Primate Arena” – a nomadic platform for experimental, free and out there music which has been running since 2008 and includes a radio show, an international festival, touring platform and a network providing local artists with additional grounds for experimentation. Recently, Primate Arena performed at Brighton’s Color Out Of Space 2013 festival.

As an improviser Sachs has collaborated with Philip Jeck, Keith Rowe, Christoph Heemann, Eyvind Kang & Jessika Keney, Oren Ambarchi, Fritz Welch, Tamio Shiriashi & Mico, Daniel Padden, Dylan Nyoukis/Blood Stereo, Adam Bohman, Usurper, Mattin, C. Spencer Yeh, Thomas Koener, Arnaud Riviere, Valerio Tricolli, Sophie Angel, Marc Behrens, Achim Wollscheid, Damon Smith, Birgit Ulher, Robert Piotrowicz, Peter Jacquemyn, @c, Eric Boros, Eyal Maoz and many others, mainly playing his self-developed system, the No-Input-Mixer, which he has been playing since 1998.

Sachs plays this machine regularly in the Doom-Dub-Noise outfits Cadaver Eyes, Special Olympics and Lietterschpich (whose debut album was labeled “Noise album of the Year” by Aquarius Records in SF). Cadaver Eyes, whose 2008 album was recorded on the Brian Turner Show on WFMU, has been featured on a compilation by WMFU alongside such artists as Mudhoney, Half Japanese, The Ex, Circle, Lau Nau, Psychadellic Horseshit and others.

Sachs holds an MFA from Bard College, NY, where his teachers included David Behrman, Richard Teitelbaum, Maryanne Amacher, Anthony Coleman, Bob Bielecki, Amy Silman, Ann Lauterbach, Luca Buvoli, Peter Ablinger and Tony Conrad.  He also attended workshops with Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros. While at Bard he founded a summer festival called THRICE, which ran for three years and featured artists like Bryan Eubanks, Bonnie Jones, Andrew Lampert, Vic Rawlings, Laetitia Sounami, Matana Roberts and many others.

He has presented his works, lectures and compositions in such festivals as Color Out Of Space (Brighton), Sonic Protest (Paris), Sonorities (Belfast), Transmediale/CTM (Berlin), Autumn Warsaw (Warsaw), George Enescu Festival (Bucharest), Festival for Jewish Culture (Krakow), Theaterformen (Hannover), Musica Genera (Sczeczin) and Skanu Mesz (Riga) as well as spaces and platforms such as  Sonic Square, RecycleArt (Brusseles), Berghain, Podewil, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, NK, O Tannenbaum, M-12 (Berlin), Melkweg (Amsterdam), Issue Project Room, ITP-NYU “guest speaker” program at NYU, Death By Audio (NY), Kulturbunker (Cologne), Muffathalle (Munich), Worm (Rotterdam), Cave 12 (Genève), Café Oto, THE WIRE magazine (London), Upgrade!, Sonic Process, Heara, Israeli Cinemateques (Israel) and many others. His work Studio with sculptor Eytan Ronel was awarded the Excellence Award by the NY International Fringe Festival in 2001.

Sachs’ works have been released on labels such as Sub-Rosa, Mille Plateaux, Heart & Crossbone, Edition Modern and various labels in Israel.

Sachs has collaborated extensively with sound artist Sebastian Meissner (Klimek, Random INC.). The two have worked on Intifada Offspring – a platform of artists from the Middle East whose work re-negotiates the regions rigid dichotomies. Together with Ran Slavin, Meissner and Sachs have released “Into The Void” (on Sub Rosa), a sonoric-textual-visual reflection on the old abandoned Jewish quarter Kazimierz in the city of Krakow.

In addition to his work with analogue unpredictable systems, Sachs is versed in digital environments such as Audiomulch, Pure-Data and MAX/MSP, the latter of which proving a useful powerful tool in realizing his sound installations. As a sound-artist his works tend fuse the sonic with the political, as in the case of “Yannun Yannun”, which portrays the harassment of Palestinian villagers by fanatic right-wing settlers and “Dead News”, released on Basque artist Mattin’s online label Desetxea. Sachs consistently produced in the framework of the site-and-time-specific Heara events (which translates as “comment” or “footnote”) in Jerusalem between 2002 and 2007, events which were curate by The Sala-manca group. While anchored in Sonic Arts, these works all adopted a critical approach to the socio-political reality in Israel, and among them were: a series of installations which begun in 2003 and subverted the spaces in which they were presented and transformed the space into mock scientific research centers for non-existing sciences (The Tower of David Fortress, 2003; The International Anglican School, 2004; Jerusalem Science Museum on the Israeli Acropolis, 2006; The LAB art centre 2006); a reconstruction of the prison cell of philosopher Antonio Negri, which was suffused with overlaying cries which were recorded in the multiple spaces of the historic prison in which it was presented, in close adjacency to Jerusalem’s security detainment facility (the Old Central Prison of Jerusalem – Underground Prisoners Museum, Jerusalem 2002).

In 2001-2005 Sachs served as music curator and PR director of Hazira art centre in Jerusalem. He curates events and programs which blur the dichotomy between music and art, such as “Which Way Out?” (the Israeli Centre for Digital Arts), the first event ever to focus on sound installations in Israel, as well as a long running series of experimental music performances which he co-curates with conductor Ilan Volkov. Since 2008 he is the director of the international program at the Musraramix festival, organized by the Naggar School of Photography, Media and New Music, where he has been a lecturer for the past 11 years. He was also the co-curator of the ctrl-alt-del program (Istanbul, 2007), which ran parallel to the Istanbul biennale. In 2004-2005 he ran a successful monthly series in Tel-Aviv’s Miklat 209 performance art centre, where he focused on aspects of technology and performance in improvised music.

Sachs’ initial encounter with electronic signal synthesis was during his army service in the mid-90s, where he was taught signal theory and analysis by ear as part of his service with the IDF Electronic Intelligence unit. He subsequently graduated from the Hebrew University in 2005, majoring in Psychology and Philosophy. In the past, he founded and managed the Yad-Vashem bookstore – the only holocaust dedicated bookstore in Israel. Currently, Eran Sachs works as the content editor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, IBA, and has been working under Musical Directors Leon Botstein and Frederic Chaslin.

Performance: