It is not true that Assaf Avidan’s voice resembles that of Janis Joplin, Nina Simone or Jeff Buckley. In our opinion, he doesn’t even look like David Surkamp from Pavlov’s Dog: Avidan’s androgynous falsetto also has a melancholy, a theatricality that, whether you like it or reject it, you recognize as your own. The influence of the Israeli folk-rock songwriter may have taken him down other paths, of course. His very voice, the stories he tells them, could also be different. But let him better explain it to us himself.

“My biggest influences are Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.” Asaf Avidan comments on “K”.. “However, what touches me most as an artist is the mythology, why people create all these seemingly fantastic stories in order to have a purpose, a narrative, a meaning in their lives. I am a big fan of the work of Professor Joseph Campbell, who studied many mythologies and religions in search of their universal element. I also read a lot of Carl Jung, who was looking for the archetypes of the unconscious. What stories do we tell ourselves so that the finiteness of life does not drive us crazy? So I’m interested in the human condition. And I’m trying to get to the place where art and music originated, in the caves, to get to know it. This quest had a key impact on me.”

All this may sound somewhat pathetic, but the life and condition of Assaf Avidan did not allow him less. Born in 1980 in Jerusalem and raised in Israel, Jamaica and New York following his diplomatic parents, the lack of a stable base characterizes him today. He decided to learn the art of animation, but before graduation, he was diagnosed with lymphoma – defeating it, he successfully worked in this area. Then a difficult breakup shocked him so much that he turned to music and released the EP “Now that you leave”, then released several Asaf Avidan & The Mojos records and finally a return to a solo career led to his last album. called Anagnorisis.

The Israeli songwriter will present his latest album titled “Anagnorisis” in Irodio.

Did you say “anagnorisis”? Yes, and actually the video for the title track was directed by Wim Wenders. The question, of course, is the origin of the name. “First of all, I’m glad that I don’t have to explain what it means,” says Assaf Avidan, and continues: “This album was the most difficult album I’ve ever written. Every day I went down to the studio, which was underground, so the process was like going down into a cave, from which I came out, finding out who I was and what I wanted to say. I then tried to translate my countless emotions. But the songs I wrote sounded very far away. I felt like I didn’t recognize myself. How can I be called an artist if this vagueness of emotions has no voice? So one night, when I couldn’t sleep, I opened Aristotle’s Poetics. I came across the term “recognition” and almost exclaimed “eureka”. I realized that if in the theater “recognition” is true, then in life it is not quite so. There is no single moment of self-consciousness because we have no “I”. That cloud of emotions was me. And when I tried to fit it into the structure of the song, I closed the door on thousands of aspects of myself. Art is a lie because it places structures in a chaotic nature. And when I realized this, I decided to embody as many aspects of myself as possible in the songs. Contradictory or harmonious, the polyphony of the album became its main theme.

Perhaps, of course, all this polyphony has deeper roots: in the upbringing of little Assaf in different cities where his parents worked. “The experience of growing up in different places, completely different from each other, studying in international schools, getting to know different nationalities, languages ​​and religions is a natural situation in the eyes of a child,” the musician concludes. “So coexisting with so many versions of a person is completely natural to me. I think that in everything I do, or rather in my work, I need to go beyond one genre, one part of the spectrum of the human voice. And I don’t understand why people limit themselves to a very narrow band of their physical or emotional existence.”

Asaf Avidian will give a concert in Herodium on September 22.