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GLOBAL EAR: TEL-AVIV
BY AVI PITCHON

As Israel’s biggest secular cultural, artistic and intellectual centre, Tel-Aviv always seems to be occupied in chasing cosmopolitan trends while maintaining a self-consciousness about its local relevance. During the 1980s and 90s it harboured a small music scene, largely centred around Industrial, indie, punk/hardcore and Metal. Most of Israel’s experimental electronic music has been spawned in Jerusalem, while in Tel-Aviv, experimental and challenging electronic music was barely audible beyond a handful of musicians like Ran Slavin or Guy Amitay, and a few collectives organising underground Hardcore Techno raves.
But leftfield music has been produced here, albeit out of hearing range of most Tel-Aviv audiences, from within the culturally secluded and segregated Russian Jewish immigrant community. This isolation stems not only from the extreme difficulty to assimilate in Israeli society, which can be terribly aggressive and intolerant, but also from the strength and elitism of the Russian community, with its own press, shops, political parties and recently even a TV channel. Many dominant figures in Russian culture see themselves as engaged in discourse with Europe, therefore inherently alien to the Middle East.

Russian-Jewish musicians generally had nothing to do with the Israeli underground scene, which was just as invisible to most native Israelis. Only a handful broke the segregation, for example freeform avant-hardcore outfit Ausweis who released their debut album with Earsay Records, a revitalised label from the Third Ear record shop which began releasing stuff steadily in the late 90s after doing so sporadically for a decade. Another act evolving throughout the late 90, the critical beatniks Grundik & Slava were perhaps the only Russian electronic musicians operating within the Israeli scene from the outset.

Two other musicians, Kostya Gervis and Stephan Friedman, have known each other since kindergarten in the town of Sverdlovsk where they began playing Russian punk covers, singing into headphones, at the age of 12. In 1991 they immigrated to Israel. “I arrived at the desert town of Arad,” recalls Gervis, “and spent my time reading Tolstoy. It was only when, during the annual Arad festival, I saw an Israeli wearing a Mohawk, that the vacuum around me collapsed. I became myself again.”
After playing in punk group Stena Sracha and discovering Industrial sounds, Gervis went to study sound engineering in England, where he carried out his first musical experiments. When he returned and subsequent move to Tel-Aviv, he built a recording studio, which became the fulcrum of a small community of musicians. Gervis worked with Boom (real name Laibach Boomstein), who drummed for Stena Sracha and operated various electronic devices in Modelo Para Armar, a Russian avant rock outfit. Together they started the duo Penetrating Crankshaft and the trio Seventeen Migs Of Spring, with vocalist Gurfa (Natalia Gurfinkel). Both acts created freeform dark electronica, utilising invented instruments such as Boom’s Screambox, made out of the keys of a public payphone wired into a circuit-bending radio.
It wasn’t until 2001 that Gervis walked into the Tel-Aviv branch of Tower Records wearing a T-shirt showing German Industrial Metal outfit Wumpscut, which meant that he was instantly cornered by shop clerk and underground scenester Rani Zager, who sang in a group called Vultures. He invited Gervis to take part in one of his group’s concerts. “Rani did more for young Russians than the governmental authorities responsible for helping immigrants did in the last 50 years,” says Gervis. “If it wasn’t for him we’d never have come out of the Russian community.”
Over the next few years more cross-fertilisation occurred. Uri Schaham, a scenester from the late 1980s and early 90s underground, resurfaced with his harsh Industrial electronics and Dark Ambient label, Tophet Prophet, and was the first to release locally the work of Russian musicians like Igor Krutogolov and Vadim Gusis (aka Chaos As Shelter) on his compilation Tel-Aviv Aftermath.
After the demise of Dynamo Dvash - the main pivotal club for promoting and giving a stage to experimental electronica – and its even more underground neighbour Mehoga, new spaces like Hatzofe (a venture of young techno rave organisers and artists, most notably the all-female Jerusalem-originated group Bnot Lilith) and Kosmonaut (artistically managed by electro DJ Rachel Freier and former punk/activist and editor of defunct dance magazine Newzeek, Moshe Kutner, both with a strong leaning towards the fringe) allowed the abovementioned projects to perform relatively regularly and reach new audiences combining the veteran survivors of past clubs and scenes with a younger, updated, fresh generation

‘Intercontinental Zvukoprocessing’ a compilation featuring different projects and collaborations, now loosely defined by Gervis as a group officially called Zvukoprocessor, was released early this year. This highly productive group is represented by a stunning spectrum of sounds, spanning from ominous foreboding post-Isolationism to flippant, tongue-in-cheek cabaret. Stephan Friedman’s Antiochus sound like a cross between some non-existent Soviet arcade game and an imaginary Manga film by Emir Kusturica. David Krupnik presents excellent minimalist compositions. The Man With Teagum play cartoonish, ingeniously idiotic Alec Empire-style digital Hardcore. EKran drop some bongos on top of Vangelis’ head. <djrED.I>, one of the sole native Israelis on board, offers psychedelic, reverberant post-rock, as well as a mix of 60s garage with lo-fi beats in Hanemerim, his collaboration with Charlie Megira.

Tamy Ben-Tor, a performance artist who found a home at the Kosmonaut, immediately attracted a loyal following from native Israelis and Russians alike with her first live music-based project, ElectroYiddish. She moved to Tel-Aviv after graduating from Jerusalem’s School of Visual Theatre and spending 8 months in London working alongside performance artist/musician Anat Ben-David. Ben-Tor developed a growing disdain for the dead-serious close-mindedness and stale conservatism of some of her contemporaries in Jerusalem, resulting in her honing of her obsession with Nazism and the Holocaust, as well as her knack for deconstructing cultural and political cliché into video art installations such as ‘Hitler – The Horror and the Horrah’. The aim of ElectroYiddish was to weld a dying, archaic language and heritage (associated with exile, victimisation and extermination) to more contemporary, sexually enlightened music by the likes of Peaches and Chicks On Speed. She sings songs by 50s Broadway Yiddish doo-woppers The Barry Sisters, alongside a Yiddish take on early 80s new-wavers The Flying Lizards’ cover of “Money”, accompanied by a toy keyboard.
“There’s a lot to be said for Jerusalem’s empty space,” she comments, “which enables you to concentrate and dig deep in yourself, but also a lot to be said for living in a younger vibrant community characterised by exchange of ideas, tension, change. I was suffocated by the smugness of some of the young Jerusalemites. In Tel-Aviv I was able to experiment in a relaxed, fun dynamic, as opposed to struggling with the overbearing presence of God. It’s a fucking commune down here. I was introduced to Dimmer (Dimitri Cherkasky), who was part of Zvuko, by Moshe Kutner from the Kosmonaut club. I recorded my stuff with him and that got the ball rolling. The fact that they’re immigrants and out of their element makes them more interesting, not to mention that specifically they are a group of very talented, highly productive people whom I respect deeply and find lots in common with regarding the way we live, what’s important to us, what makes us laugh.”

Gervis: “I’m fascinated by the mix of cultures, which is incomparable to anywhere else. It’s a mutation. I became disillusioned by the overtly judgmental, elitist Russian scene and adopted a cosmopolitan world-view.”

After a couple of shared Ben-Tor/Antiochus bills at the Kosmonaut, and the moving of former Modelo Para Armar guitarist DJ Sinichkin (real name Danik Sinaisky) next door to her in the same building, a fresh musical collaboration was born, combining Ben-Tor’s stunning presence and subversive (as well as downright hilarious) satirical ideas with Sinichkin and Boom’s less in-your-face, more expansive, yet equally nihilistic soundscapes. This fascinating collaboration is undoubtedly one of the peaks of this microscopic cultural melting pot, miraculously rising out of an ethnically fragmented Jewish society.

http://www.thewire.co.uk