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Yonatan Gat

YONATAN GAT with NATHAN & THE MEAN STREAKS, KAHUNA and AUS!FUNKT at the Silver Dollar (486 Spadina), Wednesday (July 8), doors 8:30 pm. $10-$12. ticketfly.com.


Guitarist Yonatan Gat has left a piece of his past behind.

He used to be the guitarist with garage punks Monotonix, best known for their extremely physical live shows, in which frontman Ami Shalev would grab audience members’ beers to pour on himself, leap on top of bars and occasionally set garbage cans on fire. 

By comparison, Gat’s post-Monotonix work forgoes the chaos and aggression to explore improv-heavy, mostly instrumental experiments that evoke jazz, surf, Tropicalia, blues, West African and Middle Eastern rock ‘n’ roll. 

His songs sound like what might have happened if early punk and jazz cross-pollinated with the influences of every musical culture close to the equator. The results are proudly messy and loose but also provide an amazing showcase for his and his band’s technical abilities. And it’s immediately clear that you’re hearing documents of spontaneous moments of genius and happy accidents rather than a carefully pruned modern studio recording.

“I personally don’t like music that tries to be perfect,” Gat explains from his New York home. “With digital technology, you can actually create music that is perfect, perfectly on the beat, something that perfectly hits the note. In the real world, nobody hits a note perfectly. Your ears always want to make what you’re hearing make sense. I think that’s a lot of what is pleasurable about listening to music: you hear something imperfect and you make it perfect in your head.”

His 2014 solo debut, Iberian Passage (Joyful Noise), and his new release on the same label, Director, are freewheeling and surprisingly restful, despite his overdriven guitar leads and the reckless abandon of the rhythm section. Their next EP, produced by Steve Albini and scheduled for release this September, will showcase the more aggressive and tightly focused side of the project, an aspect that’s been represented only in their live shows so far.

“This whole EP is composed of short, one-and-a-half-minute songs that are busy, brutal and fast for the entire time. It’s only 12 minutes, but a lot of things happen. This EP is much more concentrated and captures one element of this band. It’s very maximalist.”

benjaminb@nowtoronto.com | @benjaminboles

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