Asaf Avidan
Different Pulses

I encountered Asaf on the pages of Repubblica in an article at the beginning of the year. My curiosity is piqued, and I delve deeper, as always when it comes to sounds, to music. It's all connected to this track in heavy rotation on all radio frequencies, "One Day," which I then listen to and understand. I had noticed it but didn't know the source.

So I await the imminent release of the new album while watching the video of the single, the title track, a cinematic, dreamy, pulsating, obsessively oneiric track, an arrow to the heart. And then this voice, what an impact! It leaves you in a state of trance, a syncopated overbeauty, a peak, a hanging rock. It resonates like a kiss inside the stomach. There's Billie Holiday or Macy Gray, there's the soul, the rhythm & blues of effective pieces like "Setting Scalpel Free," "Love it or leave it," and "Cyclamen." These are tracks that showcase the eclecticism of this Israeli guy who is a human jukebox. Well-constructed and well-finished tracks. The shadow of Tom Yorke and Radiohead hovers over a slow and dark ballad that develops on the notes of a piano "Thumbtracks In My Marrow," there's Leonard Cohen in abundance in "Conspiratory Visions of Gomorrah," followed by the splendid symphonic airiness of a track like "A choice & a gun," which recalls the best Mercury Rev until it gently closes with a track that slowly winds around the strings of this guy, who might not be a superstar but is an honest craftsman with a voice that is a luxury, a Persian carpet. Here he crafts a highly respectable, focused, refined album, with sounds that are offspring of trip-hop, bringing to light albums like "My beautiful Demon" by the good Ben Christophers.

We have various impulses that drive us, these leave more than just a trace, a marked sign that can last over time. (7)