Winter Family was founded by Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine. They met in Jaffa, Israel, in 2004 and live together between Paris, Maxéville and Tel-Aviv since then.
Ruth Rosenthal is born in Haïfa and grew up in Jerusalem. She is graduated from the School of Visual Theatre of Jerusalem. She worked with several projects and independent Israeli theatre and dance companies as a performer or light designer, was light operator in the Israeli Opera of Tel-Aviv and was cooking in several restaurants of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.
Xavier Klaine grew up in Maxéville in Lotharingia. He obtained a first prize of piano and chamber music in The Conservatoire Régional of Nancy and a MA of political geography studies (Sorbonne University Paris IV). He was the bass player of Alive the Roupettes and Blockheads, worked in several bars in Paris and was teaching piano and chamber music.
The music of Winter Family is described as ‘doom swing’, ‘funeral pop’ or ‘weird wave’. Its dense, saturated, emotional, simple and obsessional. Ruth chants her texts, plays drums, machines and bells. Xavier plays pipe organ, piano, philicorda, harmonium, sitar & celesta. He captures also field recordings. They published Winter Family, their first album, in 2007 on Sub Rosa, Brussels. Since then they play live in clubs, theatres, churches, galleries and museums around the world and collaborate choreographers, filmmakers, musicians and artists composing soundtracks for performing arts, cinema, a train travel, art pieces and some advertisements. As a continuation to their radio piece Jerusalem Syndrom commissioned by France Culture Radio in 2009, they created the documentary theatre performance ‘Jerusalem Plomb Durci – An Hallucinatory Trip In An Emotional Dictatorship’, awarded the Paris Impatience Festival Prize in 2011, and successfully touring around the world since then (Europe, Israel, Japan & Canada).
In 2011 they published their 2nd album Red Sugar on Sub Rosa, Alt.vinyl (Newcastle), Ici d’Ailleurs (Nancy) and received the Villa Medici-Outdoor scholarship in New-York City from the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. Winter Family lived in the neighbourhoods of south Brooklyn for two years where they played concerts, moved & clean apartments, lost their gear because of Sandy Storm, bought a drum machine & moog, recorded new songs, several soundtracks and published the tape How Does Time on Psychic Mule (NYC). In NYC, Winter Family also collected sounds, images and texts to create No World / FPLL, their second theatre performance, produced by Centquatre Paris (in which they are associated artists) , Vidy Lausanne Theater and the Avignon Festival. In 2014 they moved to South Tel-Aviv and published No World a CD/book commissioned by Dis/Voir (Paris) and created Back To Sodom for the Nuit Blanche in the Jewish History & Art Museum of Paris.
Since 2016 their daughter Saralei performs most of the concerts with Winter Family. She plays the flute, machines & choirs.
Their 3rd album recorded in NYC and Tel Aviv South From Here was out on February 2017 on Ici d’Ailleurs & Alt.vinyl. Winter Family moved in Paris in january 2017, touring music and theatre in France and Europe, in 2018 they created H2 – Hebron (at FIT in 2019, read more and watch the after-show talk), their third documentary show, still touring.
Actually, they record On Beautiful Days their 4th album and they are touring Patriarchy – Living in eternal lock down, a new documentary theatre show about their own family, which was first presented in September 2022.
< photo WF
@ FIT
Patriarcat
2023
20.09 – 08.10
H2 Hebron
2019 Edition
24.09 – 06.10
