Ohal Grietzer

by  Dejan Stojkovski

Ohal is a Brooklyn-based piano player, arranger, and recording engineer for whom music is run of the bone. Brought up in Ashkelon, Israel, an old seaport town tucked into sand ridges on the Mediterranean drift, she was acquainted with the piano as a youngster and thoroughly prepared in established execution. At seventeen, incited by a runaway friendship for the French Surrealists, she cleared out Israel for France, resolved to rehearse new and non-customary types of music. Ahead to Paris with no arrangement, she conveyed just a backpack and a shrimpy MT-205 Casiotone console. 

Following a time of coordinated efforts with pop groups and visual specialists, Ohal has recently discharged her initial two solo activities: Canceled Faces, her Berlinale-acclaimed score to Lior Shamriz's film noir of a similar title, and Acid Park, an eight-development electronic suite. Ohal's sound palette is halfway handcrafted all alone synthesizers and theremins, and it overflows with sounds extending from storm cellar trials to the Baroque. Her tunes overwhelm and inspire, similar to riddles that don't need unraveling, uncovering themselves most completely through a patterned listening background. This experience had me, with my earphones on, hard-got and missing metro stops.

Ohal is likewise co-editor of the book Anarchists Against the Wall: Direct Action and Solidarity with the Palestinian Popular Struggle(AK Press) and a vocal supporter of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.