Harry’s Place Arts

Last night I went to see Tel Aviv garage rock power trio Monotonix at the Luminaire. It was the second time I’d seen them - the first time was at a bit of an artwank gig at the Corsica Studios a few months back.  I had enjoyed them massively that time, but I couldn’t quite be sure whether that’s because I was really quite drunk and getting a peurile thrill out of the way they wound up the uptight artsy crowd by dry humping men and women in the crowd, exposing themselves, spraying beer, throwing equipment and generally acting the goat.

This time, I was sober, and the crowd was altogether more rock’n'roll in their outlook and expectations - but Monotonix were still absolutely spectacular, in every sense of the word.  As you can see from the rest of my grainy phone pictures, there were still plenty of high-jinks and audience participation - not that the audience got much choice in the matter, as the band set up in the middle of the floor, then singer Ami Shalev proceeded to barge and crowdsurf into the audience, and to dismantle the band’s set up and reconfigure it at different points all over the venue: on tables, on top of the bar, on chairs being carried by audience members, under rugs and in bins.

At the centre of all this, though, was a beating heart of (im)pure rock’n'roll, virtuosic in the playing but with not a superfluous note or beat anywhere to be heard.  There was no bass player, but Yonatan Gat’s guitar kept a bass pulse and squalling distorted riffing (that suggested a training in more showy metal bands) going simultaneously, while Haggai Fershtman’s drumbeats, while brutally loud, had a rolling funk that never let up no matter how many parts of his kit were scattered around the room.  The interlocking of their playing couldn’t have been better demonstrated than by the set piece - repeated a couple of times during the set- wherein the kickdrum and its pedal would be placed somewhere across the room, with Gat playing it and his guitar part, while Fershtman played the rest of the beat: without seeing this you would not be able to tell it was not a single drummer playing.

But this was not just a competent rock band with some gooning around.  A lot has been written about the rock frontman as shaman, sometimes more deservedly than others, but with Shalev I could believe it.  Although he is teetotal and drug-free, his stage “act” is total, and his determination to break down the audience til they participate and become part of the show is irresistable.  The invasion of personal space, the English and Hebrew non-sequiturs in his between song banter, the rubbish, beer and water flung all around the place, the songs that descended into chaos, and the seeming chaos that turned into songs - all served to completely confound every expectation and every assumption of what should be done when at a rock show, til most people’s only option was to react to the music itself as it was played - and for the final descent into chaos, to pick up drumsticks and pile into the middle and join in the music itself.  (This last part was, I hasten to add, about as far from some worthy tranced-out hippie ‘drum circle’ as you could possibly get - it was chaotic and stupid and excellent)  I certainly got goosebumps from the sheer spiritedness of the whole ridiculous affair, and it’s not often I can say that about something involving a tiny hairy-backed Israeli with a walrus moustache.