// A Perfect Collaboration: Yonatan Gat and Igor Domingues // Gisell Calderón
Serendipity is not just a John Cusack easily surrender to when they’ve got half the movie. It EXISTS. And I didn’t realize it did until chops of Gat or Domingues. I happened upon one the most precious musical discoveries I’ve made in a long time: the powerYonatan Gat is the former guitarist of the house duo of Yonatan Gat and Igor Domingues. Tel Aviv garage band Monotonix. He was named Best Guitarist of 2013 by the Village Voice and I stumbled upon their 2014 EP, Iberian describes his sound as “homeless between Passage (released under Gat’s own name), one the Middle East and New York.” While Gat evening after a frustrating jam session with a built a damn-sturdy reputation for himself, Igor friend, where I had spent most of the time fuck- Domingues was drumming for the Angolan/ ing up drum fills and transitions. Defeated, I went Portuguese kuduro rockers Throes + The Shine. home, plugged my laptop into my speakers, By some work of Fate, the two encountered clicked a bunch of random links on Bandcamp, each other during a sound-check at a festival turned up the volume and began tidying up my in Portugal, where the emboldened Gat sponroom. I was at this for a while, lost in the task taneously booked a live improvisational show of locating the source of a peculiar smell, when with Domingues after hearing his African-infrom my speakers came a sudden crash of cym- fused style. The results of this were recorded on bals that settled into a meditative repetition. An a 7-inch LP and titled Live at Café Au Lait. The opportunistic guitar bit away at the rhythm, at spark had been ignited. Shortly following this, times sounding as if it were coming straight out the two recorded Iberian Passage in a spirit not of the album’s titular region and at other times unlike Miles Davis’. sounding more like Dick Dale - a bizarre combination. This continued for 4 minutes, the guitar Although the two musicians each have and drum interplay continuing persistently and their own well-respected musical styles, there is with purpose, drawing each other out, growing no hint of appropriating the familiar in their curmore and more embellished, when suddenly rent collaboration. Gat’s compositions become came the climax of the song. Finally, the drums much more informed by Domingues’ juxtaposbroke out of their strict routine and revealed a ingly wild, yet surgically precise drumming, crewildness that had been hinted at throughout the ating an intriguing mix of punk, tropicalia and entirety of the song. By this point, I had stopped surf music. I’m not going to say that Gat is at his everything to just sit down and listen. I don’t best when working with Domingues, but there’s know what it was about this duo, but there was something pretty damn special going on there. an energy in their music that I wasn’t aware I’d It’s unclear whether the two have been working been looking for: raw, imperfect, not over the together on Gat’s newest album, Director (set to top, only doing what was necessary rather than release March 3), but, needless to say, they now giving in to self-indulgence, something one can hold a permanent place on my radar. 17
