Yonatan Gat knows dangerous. As the guitarist for Monotonix – banned in many venues in its native Israel – the peril was physical.
“Monotonix ... was dangerous because you could always get hurt – wounded – at the show,” Gat said in a phone interview last week, promoting his eponymous trio’s return to Rozz-Tox on April 1. “This band is very dangerous, but because it’s musically dangerous.”
He later continued that thought: “This is a show that you can close your eyes and listen to the music. In Monotonix, if you close your eyes, a trash can would hit your head. It would be unsafe to close your eyes.”
That’s not to say that the current band – composed of Gat, bassist Sergio Sayeg, and drummer Gal Lazer – is in any way sedate. Your head might be safe from flying trash receptacles, but an ill-prepared brain might still be ducking for cover.
Gat, whom the Village Voice named New York’s best guitarist in 2013, answered questions thoughtfully and thoroughly, and he clearly thinks a great deal about music. That’s a marked contrast from the group’s fusion of the no-net ethos of improv jazz, a frenetic punk energy, and influences from world music.
For last year’s Physical Copy, a two-track EP recorded and mixed with Steve Albini in one day, the band took a striking approach.
“The songs were really, really fast and really, really intense,” Gat said. “So we couldn’t really play them for more than a minute and a half or two minutes straight. Our drummer would just collapse after two minutes. So we played them in two-minute chunks, and then rest. ... That’s what we did for three or four hours.”
And then they joined a handful of those largely improvised chunks into larger compositions in which you can hear the seams, but they feel of-a-piece. Gat said the band thought of it like a mixtape, with different tracks seguing into each other.
This was a radical departure from the method of the full-length Director – also released last year. That was more of a mosaic lovingly assembled out of studio improvs and field recordings through editing. Physical Copy is a full-on aural assault for 13 minutes, while Director has all the niceties one typically associates with studio albums, full of fine detail: “We were really thinking about the experience of listening to that record. It tells a story, it has a narrative, it has a flow.”
But don’t think it’s in any way conventional. “Rock and roll can be very, very interesting if you really, really f--- with the time of the music,” Gat explained. “You can have a song start for example in the middle, where the band is already playing, like it is the middle of the song. But the listener only hears that, so for him it’s an introduction. That gives you an ability to build a very, very strange kind of music.”
He emphasized that the band would leave the studio with, say, 15 hours of raw material that still needed to be shaped. “The composition process is in editing afterward,” he said.
So, regardless of the recording process, the goal is to create something clearly distinct from the live experience: “A recording can never compete in the same category with live. ... A recording can’t do the live thing better than the live thing can. So basically the only thing that you can try to create in a recording is to try to match that feeling, that excitement that music gives you ... using the tools the studio can give you.”
For concerts, Gat said, the band sets up on the floor, giving the audience an unusually intimate perspective. There’s no set list, and “anything could happen at any moment,” although patterns have naturally developed over time – starting with a certain type of song, for example, and moving through a typical sequence of moods. “Eventually, when you let it, a structure does emerge,” he said.
But as Gat has been putting together the band’s third album, something unexpected has happened: The editing process has begun to bleed into live performance. “Those things start surfacing at the show,” he said. “Our playing starts sounding more and more like the records, despite the fact that the records were not meant to imitate our playing. The records are actually meant to break our playing.”
Yonatan Gat will perform on Friday, April 1, as part of the five-year anniversary celebration at Rozz-Tox (2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island; RozzTox.com). The 9 p.m. all-ages show also features Brilliant Beast, Gosh!, Archeress, and We Also Let Blood. Admission is $10.
For more information on Yonatan Gat, visit YonatanGat.bandcamp.com.
