Ohad Fishof — Witchcraft and Gardening

Ohad Fishof is an Israeli experimental musician and composer with many previous works, who often integrates dance and visual components into his work. Witchcraft and Gardening is his new LP on Solid Coated, and according to their website, his first solo work since 2019. It is a colourful multigenre recording that spans from experimental jazz to vocoder-laden synth pop, apparently with a majority of instruments played by Ohad himself, though there are a couple of guest credits.

The introductory tune, "Freeze" is a free jazz horn solo paired with shimmering lunar electronic frequencies. I was hardly expecting the composed melodic electro pop of the following "Noisy Body", which uses a vocoder to impose a tune on Ohad's rough voice alongside overdriven drum sequencing with offbeat 'tribal' toms. This track is full of lush synth arpeggi that harken to trance and downtempo, or perhaps Berlin school.

The third track "Looking for Water" contains sounds that could be field recordings or some kind of synthesis, simulating an alien environment. The analog musique concrete soundscape continues with "Green Bone", with flickering dots of percussive activity and wailing modulated frequencies, and a rumbling distant ambience, with a primordial feeling. The magickal "The Spark and the Sperm" is a fuzz encrusted chordal drone with unintelligible spoken phrasing atop it, reduced through overdrive to a ghost of itself. The latter half of the track becomes a lopsided call and response of melodic loops, which all repeat at different times, at times sounding like Rapoon.

"Night Travelers" establishes a pattern of intermittent vocal numbers which include a more tempo locked feel and acid synth lines. This track could be described as trip hop, perhaps, with spoken word verses. The following "Space Story" is another such as this, with a dubby beat and spoken lyrics. These remind me of some of the 90's Pigface projects, where they had strayed from industrial influences and incorporated beat poetry, such as the "New High in Low" album. These tracks are not sonically dissimilar to post industrial recordings like Throbbing Gristle's "Part Two" or Cevin Key's "Ghost of Each Room", though this album is spiritually closer to academic expressions of avant-garde.

The sound design on these diverse pieces is incredibly inventive, with a varied collection on instruments and synthesized tones. Each piece has a totally novel texture and instrumentation compared to the previous, and the production is truly brilliant, with a massive variety of timbres saturated and treated to perfectly massage the ears.

I admire Ohad's fearless efforts to combine a world of different musical influences into a coherent narrative suite. While the style is wildly variant, one thing that remains consistent is the commitment to delirious, dreamlike oddness, bursting with bright color and whimsy. It has the mischievous spirit of some of the first music that pushed rock into more experimental soundscapes domains, such as Faust, as well as the later artists influenced by this, such as Nurse With Wound. The track "Floor", with its uncomfortably close sounds of breath, is particularly Stapleton-esque.

Simply put, Witchcraft and Gardening is a masterpiece and one of the best albums of the year. For more