Israeli Trance

Israeli Trance
Get thee to the Promised Land
New York Times Sunday October 23, 1999: Trance
Casts a Spell Over the Youth of a Worried Israel
By BRUCE FEILER

TEL AVIV — One day last May, 10,000 young people crowded into a beach-side park north of here, dressed in tank-top T-shirts and tie-dye shorts, brandishing rings from every visible body part — ears, noses, lips, bellybuttons — and dancing wildly to a techno beat that has become the latest casus belli in Israel’s most overlooked war: the one between the generations. The music, a throbbing, lyric-free form of psychedelic electronica known as trance, has swept the country in recent years, enveloping everyone from bar mitzvah candidates to elite Air Force pilots, and prompting the authorities to clamp down on what they consider a subversive form of entertainment that promotes the use of illegal drugs.

In the last year alone, the police have shut down more than a dozen underground trance parties, in places ranging from posh mansions north of Tel Aviv to desert mountains overlooking the Dead Sea.

The battle over trance highlights a larger change going on in Israel, where young people disillusioned with the lingering war with Lebanon and tensions with Israel’s Arab neighbors are expressing their desire for greater freedom by traveling abroad, exploring alternative religions and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs.

In the last year alone, the police have shut down more than a dozen underground trance parties, in places ranging from posh mansions north of Tel Aviv to desert mountains overlooking the Dead Sea.

The battle over trance highlights a larger change going on in Israel, where young people disillusioned with the lingering war with Lebanon and tensions with Israel’s Arab neighbors are expressing their desire for greater freedom by traveling abroad, exploring alternative religions and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs.

Trance, a form of music popular in India that was adopted by young Israelis who regularly flock there after their military service, has become the focal point of this movement, often resulting in enormous, unannounced outdoor festivals that draw as many 50,000 people.

Asher Haviv, 33, the organizer of many of the events, including the one last May along the Mediterranean at which he estimated that two-thirds of the participants were using marijuana, Ecstasy or LSD, likened the experience of being at a trance party to the story of Exodus. “In the Bible it says God led us from slavery to freedom,” he said. “This is freedom.”

But the growing interest in trance may signal an even greater political shift, as young people distance themselves from the values of self-sacrifice and nationalism that characterized the early years of the State of Israel and move toward self-centered instant gratification.

“It’s the most universal, post-Zionist, individualistic way of thinking,” said Dedi Zucker, 50, a former left-wing member of the Israeli parliament who once invited trance performers to play for conservative lawmakers.

He had come to the party last May, held two days before the country’s general elections, to urge the crowd to translate its frustration into votes for his nascent Green Party.

Trance music grew out of the unusual cross-breeding of high-tech, high-tempo European dance club music and the laid-back attitudes in the Indian state of Goa, popular for its beaches, drugs and all-night raves. Long a magnet for the Western counterculture, Goa has undergone something of a revival in recent years helped by a surge of visitors from Israel. Goa’s reputation as a haven for nonconformists has been enhanced in part by the media coverage of young Israelis being thrown into Indian jails for using drugs.

In Goa, the unusual fusion of Western technology and Eastern mysticism created a new sound, a sort of neo-hippie background music, with rapid-fire, computer-generated bass lines that would be familiar to any 1990’s clubgoer, coupled with eerie, space-age atmospherics that sound as if they were lifted from 60’s sci-fi films like “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Unlike house music, which averages around 120 beats per minute, or progressive house, which averages 135 to 140, trance clocks in at a mind-numbing 150.

Lior Perlmutter, 31, co-founder of the popular Israeli group Astral Projection, says the high number of beats allows listeners — or dancers — to disengage from the world and turn inward. “The music is very internal,” he said. “It’s less about touching and more about getting in touch with yourself. House is great for getting into the groove. Trance is much more individual. People don’t have to dance with a partner; they dance with the music.”

Trance first made the jump to Israel in the early 1990’s and was embraced by a fledgling group of clubgoers who had experienced the music overseas.

Groups with names like Mystica, Pigs in Space and Enlightened Evolution popped up. With song titles like “Searching for UFO’s” and “Aqua Line Spirit” and CD covers that featured air-brushed unicorns and Day-Glo crystals, the movement embraced the somewhat contradictory ideals of New Age ascetism and drug hedonism. As a result, even though most albums sold fewer than 5,000 copies at home, trance parties attracted the attention of the police.

In 1992, Avi Nissim, the other half of Astral Projection, was arrested while performing as a disk jockey at a party near Tel Aviv at which marijuana was found. Though Nissim was never accused of using drugs himself, prosecutors charged him with playing music that “promoted drug use” and asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence, seven years in prison. After four years and what Nissim says was $50,000 in legal bills, the judge ruled there was no connection between music and drugs.

“All of my life, I thought the police were there to protect me from bad people,” said Nissim, 30.

“Now I see them on the other side. I’m afraid of them.”

Oren Cristal, the president of Phonokol Records, which represents Astral Projection and other trance acts, said the authorities were concerned about a phenomenon they could not comprehend. “For them it’s very frightening,” he said.

“The biggest threat is that these young people won’t join the Army.” But trance has become embedded in Israeli society, Cristal said, and can’t be easily eradicated. “Israel is at a junction,” he said. “Forty years ago, young people were draining swamps. Twenty years ago they were fighting wars. Now they want to enjoy themselves.”

That attitude has helped Israeli trance artists become popular in Europe, where Astral Projection has a considerable following in clubs. Most of the sales of the group’s six albums, which Cristal says average around 30,000 copies a piece, come from Scandinavia, England and Germany.

Trance has become the leading export of Israeli music and may finally allow Israeli pop artists to escape the legacy of sandals and acoustic guitars that has persisted since the 1960’s, when the kibbutz was considered a model for communal living around the world.

The new image is also taking hold at home.

After existing on the fringes of Israeli society for half a decade, trance has finally made the leap to mainstream popularity. The person responsible for the transition is Eyal Barkan, a former protégé of Perlmutter and Nissim.

A slight man with stringy hair and no formal musical education, Barkan, 29, introduced catchy melodies and added samples from popular culture, like children’s cartoons. His first CD, “Good Morning Israel,” became the first trance record to achieve gold status in Israel, selling more than 20,000 copies (bootleg versions accounted for 80,000). To reach a larger audience, Barkan toned down the drug references in his music.

He was also invited to appear on a well-known afternoon children’s television show and has become a popular attraction at bar mitzvahs and weddings. Last year, Yedioth Ahronoth, the country’s leading daily newspaper, listed Barkan among its “100 most influential Israelis,” crediting him with having “brought trance into every household in the country.”

In short, BARKAN is the Ricky Martin of Osraeli Trance. BARKAN considers his music less complicated than that of his predecessors. He characterizes his sound as “victory trance,” for its Napoleonic upbeat message, while that of older artists like Astral Projection is termed psychedelic. “My music is easier on the ears,” Barkan said. “It’s more for any crowd, not just people who are in a daze.”

Because of Barkan’s clean-cut image, even the Government has embraced him. The police love me,” he said. “My image to young people is that you can listen to trance without drugs.”
With success, of course, has come rivalries among some musicians. Perlmutter and Nissim dismiss their former friend as a technician. “He’s not a musician; he’s a disk jockey,” said Perlmutter, who Barkan thanks on his albums.

Barkan responded: “It’s jealousy. I sold more in 2 years than they did in 10.”

Regardless, many of those involved are convinced that trance will only grow as teen-agers, hooked on the squeaky-clean version, move into maturity. “It’s commercial, it’s fun and it’s electronic,” said Srulig Einhorn, 21, a promoter, and Barkan’s former manager, who says he was kicked out of the Army because of his association with the music. “Now that it’s almost the year 2000, all the kids have the Internet, so for them it’s easy to get into this music.”

Sounding like an advocate of a previous generation of psychedelic music, he says trance “is not the name of a music; it’s a state of mind.” For the youth of today, he adds, “this is normal music — everybody else will just have to get used to it.”

From a New Yorker: “When they put “green nuns” on the flyer you should expect to see anyone who might have gone to college with any of them and happens to own a dat one of the band people once forgot in their house. Also Israeli organizers tend to ignore non-Israeli trancers.

From zev@zgraphics.net
Brainmachiners…I lived in israel from 1994 till about 6 months ago and let me tell you the greatest trance parties I have ever been to in my life have been there – 2 days at a time at a deserted beach… Israelis are involved with trance a lot is because a lot of them are drafted into the army at 18, when they are barely adults and after being in the army till 21 they are stressed and cracked out. The number one destination after that is Goa, India. There is a whole community of them there.

After they come back to Israel (some don’t) they try to re-create the scene out there and do a damn good job. When you experience trance Israel style there’s a lot more to it than just going to a party here and there, there is whole culture, they wear different clothes and hang out in different places and drop the best shit in town… Anyway for people that use chemical enhancers (!) of any sort the trance movement is definitely the way to go there (as opposed to here where there is the e-dropping Twilo – tunnel crowd etc.) So most Israelis that use CE are trancers and there’s your answer

We Are All Elohim: The Rosh Hashanah Party Sept 27 (also link is a NY Times review of this party, and a new article on Israelis in New York)

Hear the Latest and Greatest All-Time Israeli track!! Play at your next trance party with this sure-fire stomper that will radically re-alter their neurochemistry… when they come BACK stateside, that is… this can be their victory dance when they come back to New York – victory for staying alive!

Hebrew Trance Glossary
Close your Eyes – Lisgor Eynaim
Exhale – Linshof
Fine – Beseedy
How are you? – Mah NishiMah
Inhale – Linshom
More Music – MOOSIKA!!
No – Lo
Pain in the ass – Ben-ZONE-nah
Party – Mesiba
Thank You – To-da Ra-ba
Welcome Hi – Shalom
Well, fine – Saboba
What? – Mah
What do you want? – Mah at Rohtz
Where? – Effo?
Why? – Lama?
Yes – Ken