Four Rooms is an intimate new project from composer Juliet Palmer, mixing audio collage with song, delicately sculpted melody and field recordings.
Mingling together distant dreams and quotidian rituals, Four Rooms connects us through the unexpected sounds of our domestic lives. Sonic collages conjure new shared spaces — real and imaginary, fantastical and everyday. Each room opens our ears to a fresh sonic snapshot: the kitchen’s daily grind of coffee and tea, gushes of water and bursts of steam; the bedroom’s fleeting songs and dreams; the bath’s resonance and the healing flow of warm water. Between these rooms, we travel the stairs – indoors and outdoors, above ground and underground, from the intimate creak of wood to the hard clangs and clicks of concrete and metal.
Montréal vocalist Ayelet Rose Gottlieb sings an exquisite meditation on water — the rain and rivers which flow into our baths and kitchens and through our bodies. Four Rooms invites us to payquiet attention to expanding circles of home: our bodies, our houses, our neighbourhoods, our cities.
Juliet Palmer’s music has come to life under a highway off-ramp, in a swimming pool, in the plastic flotsam of a remote beach and in concert halls across North America, Europe and Oceania. Originally from Aotearoa /New Zealand, Juliet makes her home in Tkaronto / Toronto where she is artistic director of Urbanvessel, a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration. Her work ranges from orchestral maps of waterways and political struggles (Oil & Water for Detroit Symphony Orchestra) and multi-disciplinary outdoor projects (Singing River) to a cappella opera (Sweat) and dance (Other Nations).
This collaboration began in Vancouver in 2018 when Ayelet performed in the premiere of Juliet’s work Inside Us at Western Front. Weaving together memories of breath and heartbeat, Juliet was captivated by Ayelet’s voice and stories and resolved to work together again.
Jerusalem-born, Montreal-based vocalist Ayelet Rose Gottlieb is an international performer, an explorer of sound and a seeker of musical adventures. She creates in sophisticated simplicity blending jazz, middle-eastern & Jewish music with contemporary composition and conceptual improvisation. Her unique approach has led her to exciting collaborations including: composer John Zorn, string quartet ETHEL, dream master and Deep Listener IONE and Palestinian poet Naomi Shihab Nye.
