Algeir - Nemanut Ve’Tshuka
- FaceOff - עימות חזיתי
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - December 1995
The house we grew up in, the surroundings, the smells, the passions, the dreams, and the disappointments, all of these burst out at once in “Nemanut Ve’Tshuka” (“Loyalty and Passion”), which was released on December 1995. This is the debut album by three teenagers from "Talmei Eliyahu", Aviv Guedj, Gabriel Balachsan, and Dvir Lavi, known as "Algeir".
I said "Talmei Eliyahu", but I meant a forgotten corner of the world, on the threatening border of Gaza. A settlement established in the early 1970s by members of the French Arnon garin, families originally from Algeria who came through France, holding secular socialist values.
The collapse of the agricultural sectors of the moshav eventually led some families, including the families of Aviv Guedj and Gabriel Balachsan, toward religious return.
Guedj and Balachsan had been together since the age of two. They drew together, wrote books, and read deeply. They especially loved entering the worlds of adventure novels, like two detectives who would save the world or at least their own village.
I can picture Aviv and Gabriel reading eagerly, and I am taken back to my own childhood in a city that was still getting used to the idea that it was no longer a small village, "Ra’anana".
Early 1980s. Even in "Ra’anana" there was not much to do besides ball games. And I devoured books about "the kids of East End", "the Secret Seven", Nancy Drew, and the “Chasach” gang with enthusiasm.
"Talmei Eliyahu" was far from any real civilization, a ninety minute bus ride to "Be’er Sheva". And because of that, aside from football and basketball, there were not many ways to spend the time. Aviv and Gabriel turned to what felt like the most natural option.
“There was nothing to do in the moshav”, Guedj explains, “so we filled the boredom and emptiness with playing. We had nothing to do, we would come home from school at two in the afternoon and there were only a few options, and you have to fill the time. That is how it happened that we played five to seven hours a day.”
With no musical education and a tremendous hunger for playing and writing, they began to develop skills and a uniqueness usually found in musicians with many years of experience.
The two young musicians knew they were creating art. They wanted to continue and play as much as possible, and not even bleeding fingers would stop them. They had set a goal.
They began writing polished and complete texts. The first to recognize the potential in their lyrics was Shalom Gad, the bassist of the band "Punch", and Aviv’s older brother.
Shalom, who was already working on his own solo album with Hed Artzi, approached Haim Shemesh, the man who had signed several young and promising rock bands in their early days such as “Taarovet Escot”, “Monica Sex”, “HaHaverim Shel Natasha”, and “Eifo HaYeled”.
Speaking of “Eifo HaYeled”, Shemesh connected the members of "Algeir" with musician Assaf Sarrig who worked with them as a musical producer and also played guitar on the track “Warnings to the Soul 1995”. Because the band’s contract with "Hed Artzi" was relatively small, they recorded the album in a non sterile manner for the time, which preserved the band’s typical dirty sound. Since they lacked a bassist, Shalom Gad took on the bass guitar role.
“Nehmanut Ve’Tshuka” was released while the band members were seventeen years old. Most of the songs dealt with destructive romantic relationships, such as “Sheli”, “Letters to Michali”, and other artistic pieces including the album closer “Warnings to the Soul 1995”, which contains only the words “Winter. War. Discount operations”.
“Orphanhood has a decisive part in my lyrics, in my life”, Guedj says. When he was ten, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. His older brother Shalom, then twenty three, had already left home, and the responsibility of accompanying her fell on Aviv. He took her to chemotherapy treatments that did not help, and she passed away.
“My mother, more than anything else, was the one who influenced me and shaped me. She would sing to me for hours. She gave me the love for music and literature. She passed on to me an important part of French culture.”
He would sit with her while she read him all the texts of Jacques Brel and explained every small nuance. Together they listened to chanson and classical music. When Aviv was twenty one, his father also passed away.
Guedj absorbed the love of music on one hand, and on the other hand the love of prayer, the chants and melodies of the synagogue. He absorbed music from both Western and Eastern cultures. All of this found expression in “Nehmanut Ve’Tshuka”.
The album included seven songs, most of them long and dark, filled with sadness and with a feeling that makes you want to hug Aviv, Gabriel, and Dvir and tell them everything will be okay, even though those were the days of Rabin’s assassination and exploding buses in the streets.
“Tzarfat”, which opens the album, is a long piece describing a chaotic reality involving a wedding that collapses into destruction, a mixture of sweetness and beauty on one side and violence and cruelty on the other. The name “France” does not appear in the lyrics but expresses the chaos felt by sons of immigrants who came from France to Israel.
“God. God full of mercy. Send down love and rain.” Aviv pleads in “Letters to Michali”. Love is equal to rain, because love, compassion, and rain are all needed to live.
“Sheli”, the second song on the album, is about a girl trying to “find a better way to live”. She “bites her lips. Bites them hard”. Searching for herself and for her romantic connection.
The songs “Nehmanut Ve’Tshuka”, “Tzarfat”, and “Take the Rage” were written as one piece. The opening monologue by Gabriel Balachsan, “Beauty like yours I have never seen. Who are you” is taken from a poem by Pinchas Sadeh, “About a Girl from Emek Hefer Who Approached Me but Did Not Say Her Name”, which begins with the same exact line.
Critics praised the album, but the audience did not buy it in large numbers. “We were still teenagers and it was a genre specific record with a lot of guitar rock, not very accessible and not commercial at all”, Guedj admits. He and Balachsan shelved the album as an unsuccessful youthful attempt and went on a journey of self searching that began at the "Or Chaim" yeshiva in Jerusalem and continued into their disillusionment with the music industry.
“We felt like a factory producing lollipops on a stick”, Guedj says. “And the ones who lose are the audience, who get products instead of music, hollow products without courage or imagination. Emotionally, music is supposed to be spiritual bread, and maybe this is why there is a situation of severe malnutrition”.
Their inability to express the artistic fire inside them, and the process of writing the new material they were drawn into, led Balachsan and Guedj into heavy alcohol and drug use.
"We got to the point of smoking heroin," reveals Guedj. "You can go very far with it, very quickly, and come back very slowly." The mental breakdown was not long in coming. Guedj attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Ayalon Highway, which miraculously did not end in disaster. Balachsan swallowed pills by weight and was taken to the hospital in serious condition. Both were hospitalized in "Abarbanel".
Despite the difficulties and the darkness in the closed institution, this was only the first chapter in the history of the "Alger" band, to be continued...
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