Primate Arena

Event information

PRIMATE ARENA – Israel’s first consistent platform for a wide palette of experimental and improvised music touches down at Cafe OTO to collaborate with a clutch of like-minded souls from the UK including Adam Bohman, Sharon Gal, Dylan Nyoukis/Blood Stereo and Fritz Welch.

Hosted by Eran Sachs and Alex DROOL, PRIMATE ARENA is a bi-weekly freeform platform for experimental & out muzak events (mostly in Tel Aviv), dedicated to Psych, EAI, Noise, Speech/Sonic/Concrete Poetry, Avant Rock, post millennial obscurities, pre millennial obscurities, the history of 20th century experimental music & other adventurous ventures.

Over the past three years they have created a platform - central to Tel Aviv's now vibrant, thriving scene - that has nurtured a community of adventurous local musicians including Maya Dunietz and Yoni Silver and hosted visiting internationals such as Jérôme Noetinger, Arnaud Rivière, Ignatz Schick, Daniel Padden, Bob Ostertag and many others.

Alex (Drool) Yonovich (b.1976) is a self-taught drummer, "non-musician" and improviser living in Rehovot, Israel. he has collaborated live with a diverse selection of international musicians such as Steve Noble, Adam Bohman, Jérôme Noetinger, Steve Mackay, Dora Doll, Sharon Gal, Arnaud Rivière, Valerio Tricoli, Daniel Padden, Mattin, Ignaz Schick, Eric Boros & many more. utilizing a simple setup of modified acoustic instruments, tape loops and sometimes analogue synths he creates a variety of dynamic sounds that shift from sparse crystalline movements to dense fog shrouded avalanches, which have as much in common with the likes of John Cage and Bob Cobbing as it does with Wolf Eyes and The New Blockaders. regarded as one of the busiest experimental sound artist in Israel he has performed in many local events and festivals and collaborated with countless local artists which helped establish him as one of the most pivotal figures in the Israeli avantgarde circuit. Together with Sachs and conductor Ilan Volkov he organizes a series of ground barking performances of international visiting artists such as Daniel Higgs, King Kahn and BBQ, Susan Alcorn and others. His duo Wreck & Drool has released several recordings on labels such as Red Bootkeh, that Canadian label and Tophet Prophet.


Eran Sahcs has released albums on labels such as Sub-Rosa and Mille Plateau and has worked with artists such as Philip Jeck, Keith Rowe, Mattin, C. Spencer Yeh, Oren Ambarchi, Sophie Angel and Valerio Tricoli, mainly playing his version of a No-Input-Mixer, which he has been playing since 1998. He is currently in his second year of the summer MFA program at Bard College, NY, where his teachers include David Behrman, Richard Teitelbaum, Matana Roberts and Tony Conrad. While there he founded, as Primate Arena, a festival called THRICE, which ran for the past two years and featured artists like Bryan Eubanks, Bonnie Jones, Andrew Lampert, Vic Rawlings, Laetitia Sounami and many others. He has presented his works, lectures and compositions in such festivals as Sonorities (Belfast), Transmediale/CTM (Berlin), Festival for Jewish Culture (Krakow), Theaterformen (Hannover), Musica Genera (Sczeczin) and Skanu Mesz (Riga)as well as spaces and platforms such as Sonic Square, RecycleArt (Brusseles), Podewil, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, O Tannenbaum, M-12 (Berlin), Melkweg (Amsterdam), ITP-NYU “guest speaker”program at NYU, Death By Audio (NY), Kulturbunker (Cologne), Muffathalle (Munich), Worm (Rotterdam), THE WIRE magazine (London), Upgrade!, Sonic Process, Heara, Israeli Cinemateques (Israel) and many others. www.myspace.com/eransachs