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BEATROUTE MAGAZINE AB EDITION JANUARY 2019

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YONATAN GAT<br />

no rules and a new language, as worlds collide and cross-pollinate<br />

BY CHRISTINE LEONARD<br />

From shutting down nightclubs in Tel Aviv<br />

with his confrontational Israeli punk band<br />

Monotonix to conducting crowds through<br />

sacred ceremonies in repertoire theatres, experimental<br />

guitarist and composer Yonatan Gat has<br />

put a lot of miles on his Guild S-200 Thunderbird.<br />

After five years and a stunning 1,000 live performances<br />

with his off-the-hook punk group, Gat has<br />

honed his musical skills and had the opportunity<br />

to practice his trade alongside a wide range of<br />

talented individuals. Somewhere along the way<br />

he became a collector of sounds, a passion that<br />

would serve the New York-based virtuoso well as<br />

he entered the second phase of his career.<br />

“I think the main thing I learned from touring<br />

with a band like Monotonix, which was a combination<br />

of a rock ’n’ roll band and extreme theatre,<br />

is that the less you try to control everything and<br />

the more you open yourself up to the moment<br />

around you, the more interesting everything<br />

around you becomes,” explains Gat. “Life is crazy<br />

and unpredictable and can’t be analyzed, it just<br />

happens!”<br />

That willingness to embrace spontaneity<br />

combined with Gat’s broadening knowledge<br />

of recording techniques and ethnomusicology,<br />

generated a solo EP, Iberian Passage, in early 2014.<br />

And, by the following year the ambitious multi-instrumentalist<br />

was ready to reveal his full-length<br />

debut, Director.<br />

“When I’m deep into working on an album it<br />

consumes everything and every element of my<br />

work goes into it,” he explains.<br />

Recognized for his genre-challenging guitar<br />

rock improvisation, Gat isn’t content to simply<br />

draw on outside influences when composing his<br />

albums. He routinely invites players from around<br />

the world to bring their craft into his recording<br />

studios to add their own traditional methods to<br />

his modern curations.<br />

“Right now, I’m editing an interpretation of<br />

Antonin Dvorak’s American String Quartet with<br />

Greg (Saunier) from Deerhoof on drums, Mikey<br />

(Coltun) from Mdou Moctar’s band on bass and<br />

an organ player called Curt Sydnor. I play guitar<br />

and it’s a very live and raw arrangement of a 19th<br />

century string quartet.”<br />

This openminded approach to incorporating elements<br />

of regional music into his own nibble rock<br />

guitar overtures has made him a much-sought-after<br />

songwriting partner, especially amongst those<br />

looking to expand the borders of their art.<br />

“Other projects I got to be a part of included<br />

traveling to Brazil and working on some recordings<br />

with members of a tribe called Wapichana.<br />

They are from the Amazonian region of Roraima,<br />

at the north of the country right by the Venezuelan<br />

border. They create very holy music, full of<br />

repetition and a lot of imagination. Chris Pravdica,<br />

who played in Swans, is playing bass on the recordings,<br />

and Paul from Thee Oh Sees was playing<br />

drums with us in the studio because we were<br />

touring together and he was available that day.<br />

He is a great improviser and did an amazing job.<br />

I’m also working on more film and music projects<br />

with the Eastern Medicine Singers and planning<br />

some recording sessions with my touring band<br />

that includes musicians like Max Almario and<br />

Thor Harris, we’re working on blocks of physical<br />

sound that will be edited into songs.”<br />

Gat’s vision of music as the universal language<br />

is perhaps best exemplified by his latest release,<br />

Universalists, which appeared in May of 2018.<br />

The culmination of a nomadic lifestyle, rigorous<br />

cultural cross-pollination and editing more than<br />

100 hours of recording sessions, Universalists pulls<br />

together the harmonic threads that run through<br />

the heart of the Renaissance-man’s transnational<br />

switchboard of ideas and perspectives.<br />

“In the last album, a lot of the work focused<br />

on fitting ideas from different worlds under the<br />

same umbrella by using sound manipulation and<br />

editing,” the maestro elaborates. “Good memories<br />

from a tremulous 2018 were touring with<br />

an eight-piece band that included the Native<br />

American group Eastern Medicine Singers. They<br />

are incredible drummers and singers and working<br />

with them really changed the foundations of<br />

how I look at music. Our collaboration is a rare<br />

project that touches listeners on a deep level, and<br />

it was an honour to watch it manifest on stages in<br />

different continents on an epic scale, despite the<br />

political climate.”<br />

Honouring tradition while side-stepping conformity,<br />

the success of Gat’s celebratory sonic smashups<br />

proves that when it comes to musical innovation<br />

nothing is outside of the realm of possibility.<br />

“In music there are no rules and data can teach<br />

us nothing. It’s really something else. That’s why<br />

people gravitate to it, when there is no logic what<br />

we have left is music.”<br />

Yonatan Gat headlines Jan. 23 at Winterruption<br />

Festival (Saskatoon), Jan. 25 and 26 at BIG Winter<br />

Classic (Calgary) and Feb. 1 at Lee’s Palace<br />

(Toronto).<br />

ROCKPILE <strong>BEATROUTE</strong> • <strong>JANUARY</strong> <strong>2019</strong> | 23

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