Nishmat Hashmal is a live performance by Roberto Paci Dalò that relates Jewish Chasidic music to contemporary electronic music. The broken melodies, the loops, the unusual vocal frequencies, the sound landscapes and the noises, common both to the tradition of Jewish mysticism and to that of the “club culture”, become the protagonists of a performance all realized in real time. Also the “video mapping”.

Nishmat Hashmal is a live performance in all its components: sound, video, light. In fact, everything that happens within the performance is created in real time through digital and analog technologies. Even the video image that is the scene of the performance (video mapping) is used mixed materials in real time on the beats of sound. The visual materials projected are made up of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, that are suggestive and composite in their structure. In Nishmat Hasmal, the letters are projected onto houses and buildings, creating a singular overlap between real architecture and projected images. Just like in the port of Maratea, in 2009.

From dubstep to klezmer

Characteristic of chassidic music is the theory and practice of ecstasy, which in Nishmat Hashmal is combined with urban sounds and electronics.
In fact, Nishmat Hashmal is a celebration of “club culture” in relation to the Jewish mystical world: it is an experience through innovative electronics and chassidism. It goes from the genres of “dubstep” and “noise” to the Jewish melodies “klezmer”.

Trance and pray

The chassidic movement, born in Central-Eastern Europe in the second half of the 18th century, represents the reaction to the forms of Jewish intellectualism. From the beginning, chassidism gave particular importance to singing and musical practice, considering them fundamental for prayer: it represents an attempt to “experience” the divine.

“Club culture” is a historical and cultural movement in which contemporary dance has its origins. It refers to the practice, most common among young people since the 1970s and 1980s, of meeting in discos and festivals to socialize, dance, drink and recreate.

Nishmat Hashmal combines these two worlds through acoustic and visual composition. It is a performance that explores rhythm a and reflects on a practice of trance and prayer through sound, image, public participation.