Calderón...........A Perfect Collaboration

// A Perfect Collaboration: Yonatan Gat and Igor Domingues //

Gisell Calderón

Serendipity is not just a John Cusack movie. It EXISTS. And I didn’t realize it did until I happened upon one the most precious musical discoveries I’ve made in a long time: the powerhouse duo of Yonatan Gat and Igor Domingues.

I stumbled upon their 2014 EP, Iberian Passage (released under Gat’s own name), one evening after a frustrating jam session with a friend, where I had spent most of the time fucking up drum fills and transitions. Defeated, I went home, plugged my laptop into my speakers, clicked a bunch of random links on Bandcamp, turned up the volume and began tidying up my room. I was at this for a while, lost in the task of locating the source of a peculiar smell, when from my speakers came a sudden crash of cymbals that settled into a meditative repetition. An opportunistic guitar bit away at the rhythm, at times sounding as if it were coming straight out of the album’s titular region and at other times sounding more like Dick Dale - a bizarre combination. This continued for 4 minutes, the guitar and drum interplay continuing persistently and with purpose, drawing each other out, growing more and more embellished, when suddenly came the climax of the song. Finally, the drums broke out of their strict routine and revealed a wildness that had been hinted at throughout the entirety of the song. By this point, I had stopped everything to just sit down and listen. I don’t know what it was about this duo, but there was an energy in their music that I wasn’t aware I’d been looking for: raw, imperfect, not over the top, only doing what was necessary rather than giving in to self-indulgence, something one can easily surrender to when they’ve got half the chops of Gat or Domingues.

Yonatan Gat is the former guitarist of the Tel Aviv garage band Monotonix. He was named Best Guitarist of 2013 by the Village Voice and describes his sound as “homeless between the Middle East and New York.” While Gat built a damn-sturdy reputation for himself, Igor Domingues was drumming for the Angolan/ Portuguese kuduro rockers Throes + The Shine. By some work of Fate, the two encountered each other during a sound-check at a festival in Portugal, where the emboldened Gat spontaneously booked a live improvisational show with Domingues after hearing his African-infused style. The results of this were recorded on a 7-inch LP and titled Live at Café Au Lait. The spark had been ignited. Shortly following this, the two recorded Iberian Passage in a spirit not unlike Miles Davis’.

Although the two musicians each have their own well-respected musical styles, there is no hint of appropriating the familiar in their current collaboration. Gat’s compositions become much more informed by Domingues’ juxtaposingly wild, yet surgically precise drumming, creating an intriguing mix of punk, tropicalia and surf music. I’m not going to say that Gat is at his best when working with Domingues, but there’s something pretty damn special going on there. It’s unclear whether the two have been working together on Gat’s newest album, Director (set to release March 3), but, needless to say, they now hold a permanent place on my radar.