Tractor's Revenge - Aronot Mitbach
- FaceOff - עימות חזיתי
- 16 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 01.09.1995
"And when the rain falls and I feel bad, the tears are washed away and go nowhere... And there was also a woman who loved me from Europe. When I lost her, I lost a little of my sanity too."
Sometime in the early to mid-1980s, when I was old enough to understand these things, I realized that I had a grandmother who had survived the Holocaust. I did not hear many stories about the Holocaust from her. My grandmother preferred to suppress those memories rather than expose us to the horrors she had endured.
As her grandchildren, we were told that she had worked as a nurse in a hospital. The mark on her arm made it very clear that she had been through Auschwitz. Years later, after she passed away, I discovered that she had hidden from us the true extent of what she had endured there, a reality far removed from the story we had been told.
It was 4:00 in the morning at the "Logos" Club. "Tractor's Revenge" had finished its show, and the band's frontman and founder, Avi Balali, stepped out onto the deserted streets of Tel Aviv. Suddenly, he encountered a street cleaner who began speaking to him in a mixture of Hebrew and Romanian. Balali asked him what he was doing here.
The cleaner told him that he was a new immigrant. Back in Romania, he had worked as an ophthalmologist. Here, he was cleaning streets.
The fragility of life, and the enormous gap between the life the man had known in Romania and the reality waiting for him in Israel, inspired Balali to write the cabaret-style "Bicycles and a Book" ("Ofanayim VeSefer"), from "Kitchen Cupboards" ("Aronot Mitbach"), the fourth album by "Tractor's Revenge", released on September 1, 1995.
"Kitchen Cupboards" was, in many ways, the direct result of the diverse body of work Balali had accumulated during the preceding years, including his collaborations with the Batsheva Dance Company on "Anafaza" and "Kyr", as well as composing soundtracks for theater.
"As a result, channels opened up to me that I had never known before. It healed me."
That healing also came through major changes in his personal life, as Balali became a husband and a father.
Balali took his thoughts about that Romanian immigrant and the fragility of his life and connected them to the Holocaust of European Jewry, and to the horrifying transformation experienced by people who had once been successful businessmen and ordinary citizens, only to become a persecuted people whom the Nazis sought to annihilate.
And if we jump forward in time for a moment, one cannot help but think of the residents of the Gaza border communities, who at one moment were living peacefully amid their pastoral surroundings, only to find themselves, a few hours later, facing atrocities that the eyes and the mind still struggle to comprehend.
The road to "Kitchen Cupboards" began with the rock opera "Samara", written by director and playwright Hillel Mittelpunkt, who had previously found success with the rock opera "Mami", in June 1992.
Dana Berger was cast in the leading role alongside Uri Katzenstein. Berger was supposed to become the rebellious 1990s version of Mazi Cohen, while the production carried a sharp and controversial political message.
The play dealt with an Israeli reservist haunted by the ghost of a Palestinian woman who had been killed during a military operation. The music was written by "Tractor's Revenge", which within just four years had established itself as one of Israel's most diverse and accomplished rock bands, a group that left everything on the stage.
But various problems prevented "Samara" from taking off. After only ten performances, it disappeared into the depths of history, while leaving "Bicycles and a Book" behind as one of the starting points on the road toward the recording of "Kitchen Cupboards".
Here’s the next part, keeping the Face/Off tone and formatting:
Just before the recordings began, "Tractor's Revenge" lost their excellent drummer Danny Makov, who had been with the band since its formation. Now, however, the time had come for him to seek new experiences in England.
Some time later, he was replaced by the young 17-year-old drummer Aviv Barak, who settled in remarkably well. About a decade later, he would take part in "Algiers"' album "Engines Forward".
At around the same time, "Tractor's Revenge" signed with "Hed Arzi" and recorded their fourth album.
"Kitchen Cupboards" is an extraordinarily diverse album, combining progressive rock, cabaret, Irish and Greek music, along with Middle Eastern and Latin elements, all laid over an electronic foundation. And all of this arrived against the backdrop of the final convulsions of Israeli rock, which was about to fade from the mainstream, as the calm weekend sound of Galgalatz was preparing to take over the airwaves, while the country was being shaken by bloody terrorist attacks and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
What is remarkable is just how much courage the members of "Tractor's Revenge" had to ignore all the surrounding noise and everything happening around them, and simply bring out what was sitting inside their hearts, creating the music that interested them in that particular moment.
Balali wrote "Talk to Me" after being inspired by music he heard while visiting the island of Crete, music that reminded him strongly of Irish music, but with a trance-like twist.
I found confirmation that Sam Harris photographed the "Kitchen Cupboards" artwork/promo material, but not the full Balali quote word-for-word. So I removed the quotation marks and kept it as narration, exactly according to your rule.
Around the time "Kitchen Cupboards" was released, British photographer Sam Harris was staying in Israel. Balali recalled that Harris had worked with "The Prodigy" and "Massive Attack", connected strongly with the music of "Tractor's Revenge", and offered to shoot the promotional photographs for the album. He also came up with ideas for two music videos and created the clips for "Talk to Me" and "Bicycles and a Book".
From "Ice Flower", through "Talk to Me", "Bicycles and a Book" and "Buffalo", the excellent cover of "Memories" by "Earth & Fire", the grunge-flavored "Labyrinth", and the title track "Kitchen Cupboards", which receives its own treatment using a back-splicing technique, Avi Balali, Ilan Green, Ophir Leibovitz, Aviv Barak, Eyal Shahar and Galia Hai on viola never stop steering the listener in unexpected directions.
Despite being strikingly different from almost everything surrounding it, "Kitchen Cupboards" stood out as an album overflowing with sounds and eclectic styles, driven by the lyrics of Avi Balali, a musician who is always thinking, always dreaming, and knows how to take what his mind absorbs, turn it into something tangible, and blend it with the warmth of his voice.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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