ATONIA
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Atonia is my collaboration with Wyatt E (BE), and Five the Hierophant (UK), specially commissioned for the 2022 edition of Roadburn Festival, one of Europe’s leading heavy music event. The clash of doom, drone, and psychotrap has produced a hybrid set, conceptually drawing on an array of ancient liturgical and folkloristic inspirations from Hebrew to Latin. The lyrical and melodic content I compiled, offers a collection of interpretations of texts from the far-to-near past, each containing its own abyss of symbolic, theological, and political context. I this project I do my best to sing-speak-utter-scream these texts, shifting between vocal techniques.
The culmination of musical ideas by the three entities welded together on one hectic weekend and performed in front of an audience only once, and later released as a live record, documenting the act remembered as one of the most striking collaborations of that year.
The culmination of musical ideas by the three entities welded together on one hectic weekend and performed in front of an audience only once, and later released as a live record, documenting the act remembered as one of the most striking collaborations of that year.
“Sadot” (“Fields”) is a rendition of an early Hebrew folk tune, charged with cultural and political explosives; the lyrics tell a tale about one who returns from a deathbed to a beloved valley in order to soothe and heal his suffering. The track opens with an excerpt from a tape recording by my mother, Avigail, who passed away during the work on this record. She can be heard singing the more traditional version of the song she recorded in 1988.
“Kol Badai” and “Polyxena” are both built on excerpts from the old Hebrew translation of Roman poet Ovidius' Metamorphoses. “Polyxena”, performed as a spoken oration, tells the story of the brave and brutal sacrifice of Princess Polyxena, daughter of Hecuba and King Priam of Troy, slaughtered on the very grave of her fallen husband Achilles, whose ghost demands that his woman cannot live while he is not alive to have her. This episode is followed by a deconstruction of a text by Israeli playwright Yonatan Levy, about the symbolic death by drowning of the controversial IDF general Rafael Eitan. “Kol Badai” (“A Liar’s Voice”) is an allegorical, surrealistic description of a community ruled by rumours, where a lie-spreading mob is guided by mistakes, and everything is automatically taken for granted as the truth.