Ami Shavit
Neural Oscillations And Alpha Rhythms

THE REVIEW

Probably Ami Shavit cannot be defined as a true composer. However, his interest in music dates back to the seventies. Opposed to the Kuppur War, Ami Shavit was nonetheless conscripted and forced to take part in the armed conflict also known as the "Ramadan War". This experience marked him psychologically and pushed him to devote even more to his speculative interests in the philosophical and technological fields. As a multimedia artist and an established professor of philosophy and art, he literally began collecting synthesizers in his Tel Aviv home in 1972. He became interested in the psychophysiological intervention method known as "biofeedback" or "biological feedback", considering music as the tool through which to practice this type of intervention and to achieve a meditative technique capable of recognizing and preventing the physiological alterations underlying pathological conditions and their consequent reduction/elimination. According to Shavit's conceptions, the process had to be defined in a directly proportional relationship between sound oscillations and brain waves defined as "Alpha waves", characterized by a frequency from 8 to 13.9 hertz and typical of wakefulness with closed eyes and the moments before falling asleep.

The result of his studies culminated in the production of a series of minimalist compositions he called "Alpha Mood". His musical experiments then also became the subject of various artistic installations and were also published in a limited edition of only 500 copies, distributed exclusively by a small music store in Tel Aviv, before being rediscovered in 2015 by the Finders Keepers label, which took care of reissuing the LP.

Conceived and realized in a state of total isolation concerning the non-existent Tel Aviv music scene, Ami Shavit's work has largely been lost over the years. Excluding the aforementioned LP, a long research work managed to recover undated experimental recordings prior to "Alpha Mood" which formed the basis on which he then completed his work. These recordings, with a total duration of almost thirty minutes, have now finally been made available and published on LP again by Finders Keepers, titled "Neural Oscillations And Alpha Rhythms".

Clearly devoted to artists like Tangerine Dream and the minimalism of Philip Glass with obvious influences from those sounds from the Middle Eastern area, historically a melting pot and meeting point of people from all over the world, Ami Shavit can be defined as a composer by chance whose invaluable work, both musically and conceptually, unfortunately largely lost, has been fortunately collected in these two publications, of which this second certainly does not constitute scrap material, but rather further conscious suggestions and synthetic sound vibrations and speculative argumentation.