Maya Shenfeld^de

“During the past couple of years I’ve been thinking a lot about time. For me, this preoccupation has a musical origin: I’ve always thought of music as a way of sculpting in time. The title of my most recent album, Under the Sun, is a play on the well-worn quote from Eclesstiastis, “There is nothing new under the sun,” which asks: is there, really? In light of the looming climate crisis, can we talk, in a stoic way, about eternal cosmic repetition with the same surety? 

For this podcast Abraham Joshua Heschel’s notion of the Sabbath as what he calls “a palace in time” was my point of departure. For Heschel, modern life is dominated by an obsession with space — with building, mastering, and conquering things of space. We’re obsessed with producing “things”. Jenny Odell, in her book How to Do Nothing, similarly is interested, in a sense, in how we’ve turned time into just another “thing”, just another value to extract from. 

Today, time is captured and monetized by online platforms. To win over our time, our attention, online platforms turn us into obedient doom-scrollers. Our anxieties are amplified, polarization is worsened, differences are sharpened, anger is stoked. When we’re not working, we are expected to consume and share media, to promote ourselves, or spread a cause – often both. Time is the key currency in this logic. Time is money, as they say.

But the thinkers featured in this podcast suggest an alternative: slowing down, listening, observing beauty, towards cultivating a different kind of attention—one grounded in openness to the world. 

Recorders, organs, strings, vocoders, distortion, and analogue synths, are woven together with short excerpts from conversations and lectures that have resonated with me during the past year. The excerpts are taking from a talk by Jenny Odell about her book How to do Nothing, and two episodes from Ezra Klein’s podcast: a conversation he did with Judith Shulevitz about her book The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, and a recent conversation with novelist Marilynne Robinson, which revolved around her new book Reading Genesis. 

With love and thanks to Gineke Pranger”

ensemble 014 is a creation by Maya Shenfeld, produced by Electroni[k] / Maintenant festival, in co-production with Les Siestes as part of SHAPE+.