From the mid-aughts until 2011, Israeli garage-rock trio Monotonix set fire, literally, to the American underground. The band’s concerts took the form of stunt-filled spectacles—featuring trash-can infernos, singing-while-crowd-surfing and mosh-inciting antics—that overshadowed the raw Mudhoney-ish din of records like Body Language and Not Yet. But lately, Monotonix guitarist Yonatan Gat has reinvented himself as a world-music riff maven.
On the forthcoming Iberian Passage (Joyful Noise), Gat sheds his former band’s arena-ready heft and shtick for a fusion of interstellar psychedelia overdrive and free-jazz-inspired improv. A period of countryhopping took Gat from his native Israel to Spain and then Portugal, where he found his muse: ’60s psych-pop pioneers Os Mutantes. In the six lo-fi, solo-dominated trips on Iberian Passage, Gat—with drummer Igor Domingues providing the African-flavored backbeat—combines his tropicalia passion with bossa nova rhythms, field recordings and impromptu singing that evokes not just the Mutants, but Arto Lindsay’s Brazilian-music forays. The string virtuoso recently settled in New York, so expect to see a lot of Gat around town. Until his next odyssey, that is.—Brad Cohan