Kufsat Shimurim – Afor Gashum

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“Kufsat Shimurim” – Afor Gashum

At once urgent and atmospheric, “Kufsat Shimurim” churns post-punk-ishly, augmented by the canny use of random sounds and sound effects. The song takes its time to unfold, as the instrumental palette–guitars, bass, drum, noise–marks out a series of chords presented in a clipped, persistent rhythm. When they start (0:43), lead singer Michal Sapir’s pure, high-ranging vocals, in Hebrew, offer an effective counterbalance to the murk and clangor in the background. At the song’s midway climax, the instrumental break transitions from the legible to the abstract, as various electronic tones interject atonally but compellingly. Even without understanding a word of what’s being said I get a very 2024-ish sense of light struggling for footing in the darkness.

Based in Tel Aviv, Afor Gashum is a trio that self-identifies as a “long-standing and prominent member of Israel’s underground dissident music scene.” After a well-regarded debut cassette in 1989, the band, going their separate ways, did not record another album until 2013, but have been intermittently releasing albums ever since. “Kufsat Shimurim” is a track from their fifth album, Temperature, released last month. According to the band, the song grew out of Sapir’s participation in something called the Noise Agency, which was an artist residency program in Tel Aviv dedicated, broadly, to the art of sound. Sapir was specifically involved in a project that involved sending people out to make “various sound interventions” in public urban spaces. The song itself, says the band, “examines the possibility of a group of sonic agitators to introduce a different voice, foreign and subversive.”

And because I cannot directly understand the song’s lyrics, I will leave you as well with what strikes me as a powerful mission statement for Temperature, via the album’s Bandcamp page:

At a time when the struggle for justice and equality for all feels more urgent than ever, Temperature sets out to explore unstable harmonic territories, possible science-fictional worlds and transformative emotions, in a bid to imagine a different future – more interconnected, responsible, equal and just.