Ezekiel Honig

Ezekiel Honig’s work rides the tender line between abstraction and concrete immediacy. His emotively warm electronic-acoustic music uses a multitude of everyday real-world objects and spaces, tethering to our physical universe while eschewing any concerns of figurative reality. Plastic, metal, wood, and air coalesce with Rhodes, guitar, horns, piano, and other instrumental origins, creating a sound of contrast and contradiction – pairing inviting, fuzzy chords with clunky and dirty mishaps. Using the loop as more of a tool than a rule, Honig paints outside the lines, nestling into a comfortable, shared space between melodic event-driven ambient, muted slowmotion techno, and textural downtempo – using them as reference points from which to stray, rather than as steadfast frameworks. Honig finds a sense of balance – of past and future, acoustic and digital, a disconnected materiality – by grounding himself in the idea that a sound can be both a representation of infinite stories, emotions, possibilities, and simultaneously, simply a sound to be used in a work of audio.

In 2014 Honig published his first book, Bumping Into a Chair While Humming: Sounds of the Everyday, Listening, and the Potential of the Personal, an exploration of the sonic potential in everyday objects, spaces, and interactions. With a focus on the benefits of a strong listening practice and search for a personal soundscape, the book took steps towards formalizing and concretizing methods that Honig has exercised instinctually in his sound productions.

He is interested in connecting threads – using sound as a focal point that allows spilling out into various disciplines. Towards this end he consistently moves into extracurricular territory –  music/sound design for film, painting/collage, producing limited edition handmade packages for music releases, writing, teaching sound production. He has gravitated towards a variety of directions, to translate and communicate in different ways, but the origin is a love of sound.