Music From The Center Of The World
For producer and multi-instrumentalist Kutiman, the world’s at his fingertips
My first exposure to producer, digital mashup artist, and multi-instrumentalist, Ophir Kutiel—better known by his nom de plume, Kutiman—was when my friend, photographer Eilon Paz [full disclosure, I am a contributor to Paz’s coffee table book, Stompbox, which was released in late 2020, and yes, you should buy a copy], sent me a link to this incredible video:
Mind blown (yours will be, too, stop what you’re doing, and click on the link). The video is a mashup of random snippets of musicians filmed performing in venues, and at significant locations, around Tel Aviv. It’s part of a collection of similar videos filmed in other cities around the world—like Hamburg, Istanbul, Tokyo, and Jerusalem—and was the outgrowth of Thru You, which is a less elaborate, although equally ambitious, video project.
Thru You is a video iteration of the music of artists like DJ Shadow and Avalanches, and creates songs from samples of unrelated videos on YouTube. “Thru You Too #4, Give It Up,” was a viral sensation, featured vocals from New Orleans native, Samantha Montgomery—also known as Princess Shaw—and led to the Ido Haar documentary, Presenting Princess Shaw, which follows Montgomery’s rags-to-riches adventure and subsequent journey to Israel to perform with Kutiel. (This is a link to the trailer, but have tissues handy, because it’s a tearjerker).
But sampled video mashups are just a small part of what Kutiel does. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, and plays the keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums, and his self-produced albums explore various groove-based genres like afrobeat, funk, reggae, dub, and assorted Mediterranean styles. On his records, he collaborates with vocalists—like Shai Tsabari, Karolina, and others—and works with horn players and others to cover the parts he can’t do himself. On stage, he recreates his music with the help of a larger ensemble, the Kutiman Orchestra, which, in pre-pandemic times, played festivals and clubs throughout Israel and Europe.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In 2018, Kutiel’s first ambient release, Don’t Hold Onto the Clouds, saw him featured as Bandcamp’s artist of the week (that’s a big deal). He’s also received commissions from organizations like Greenpeace, recorded on location in Tanzania, and his audiovisual work, “Off Grid,” was exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
In 2020, with the world locked down and off limits, Kutiel got even busier, and released a number of albums, including Wachaga, featuring music from his 2014 trip to Tanzania, collaborations with Tsabari and Turkish vocalist, Melike Şahin, Hibiscus, which is an exploration of Thai jazz with bassist Elran Dekel and guitarist Uri Brauner Kinrot, and on and on and on.
In 2013, after 12 years in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Tel Aviv, Kutiel relocated to Tze’elem, which is a somewhat isolated kibbutz in southern Israel. I asked him what it’s like living in the middle of nowhere. “That depends how you’re looking at it,” he says. “For me, it’s the center of the world.”
Needless to say, I had a fascinating conversation with Kutiel about his apprenticeship with artists like Haim Laroz and Ronen Sabo, the process behind crafting his Thru You and Cities videos, his musical wanderlust and willingness to experiment, and the magic of working and recording at his studio in the desert.
You have a band, the Kutiman Orchestra, but that’s when you play live. On your albums, do you play all the instruments yourself?
Most of the time, I play all the instruments. I’ll bring in a guest, like a horn player, and then when we play live, everyone learns their parts and we play it together.
What was your first instrument and how did you end up playing so many?
I started on piano when I was six years old, and then moved from there to others. Piano, when I was 16, wasn’t cool enough. You couldn’t get girls with piano [laughs]. I started to play the drums a bit, and guitar. But I was never a master of any of them.
Did you take lessons or go to music school?
I took some. When I was a kid I had private piano teacher. When I was 18, I went for a year to music school, but I wasn’t really good with the teachers or schools. But I am not a master on any instrument. I just play an instrument until I can do something practical with it.
Was it after you moved to Tel Aviv that you started playing and growing as a musician?
Yeah. I moved to Tel Aviv and started playing with bands, working with a computer, recording, and got into the music world. When I was in Zikhron Ya’akov, where I grew up, back in the 1990s, it was like nowhere. Without the internet, you had no way of knowing what’s going on in music. There were no record shops, not anything. You had to go to Tel Aviv.
What was your introduction to Afrobeat, funk, and more underground types of music?
I didn’t even know about James Brown until I was 20. I mean, I knew who he was, I knew the song, “Sex Machine,” but nothing more than that. But I started playing with a jam band called Ani Kuku, which is Hebrew for, “I’m nuts,” and one of the band members was Sabo [Ronen Sabo]. He’s maybe 10 years older than me. He’s in Tel Aviv. He’s a DJ and a real music collector. He gave me a box of CDs and told me to listen. It opened my head to new genres of music. We are still very close friends. We traveled to Jamaica and we produced music together. He has always been like a mentor to me, until today.
Did you spend a lot of time learning up production, and getting your skills together with Sabo?
I am still learning. Even before I was doing stuff with Sabo, I was with Haim Laroz. Haim is about 20 years older than me. He’s an amazing producer. One of the only CDs I had when I was growing up in Zikhron Ya’akov was like this jungle music [by Haim Laroz]. It was something crazy that I had, and I had a dream to work with him. Sabo somehow introduced me to him when I was 18. I did a remix for him, and he said to me, “Come work with me in the studio.” I did that for a couple of years and it was a really good school for me. I learned a lot from him. Then I started working with Sabo, and I learned a lot from Sabo, too.
Sabo and I went to Jamaica together. Jamaica was also a big schooling experience for me, because we didn’t have any equipment. We just had a laptop. We were living in very bad conditions, and had just a laptop and all kinds of tracks that we did on the computer. We thought we were going to go to Jamaica and have a big studio with instruments and facilities, but that wasn’t the case. We had to learn up and master cut-and-paste. We had to do that in order to create new rhythms and new music. We just kept recycling whatever we had. That was a big education for me. After that, I did all those YouTube projects, which were based on things I had learned in Jamaica. That cut-and-paste, take anything and make anything from it. That was a big school for me.
Was that your starting point for all those Thru You videos?
That’s definitely where I learned it. We were in Jamaica for almost a year. We had no instruments, and kept creating new rhythms. We had a couple of bass lines that we made. I have tons of bass lines—different bass lines from these few bass lines we had—and kept recycling. That was really a school.
What was your influence for putting together samples like you did in those videos? Have you checked out artists like Avalanches, DJ Shadow, and people like that?
Definitely. DJ Shadow was my hero. When I first arrived in Tel Aviv, and I didn’t know anything about good music, and Sabo gave me that box of CDs to listen to—DJ Shadow was one of them, and that was one of the first head-spinning experiences I had with music.
Did you start the Thru You series with an instructional video from legendary session drummer, Bernard Purdie?
Yeah. I don’t know if it is still on YouTube, but I made a video with Bernard Purdie even before the first Thru You video. I did one where he is playing and talking at the same time. He’s teaching in the [source] video I used.
Like I told you, I am not really good with teachers and schools. I was just looking for stuff, and when I found out about YouTube, it was amazing for me. I thought, “I can learn so much. I can learn guitar and drums and whatever I want.” I fell in love with YouTube. I started watching a lot of tutorials to improve my playing. I came across this Bernard Purdie video where he explains and plays this groove, [the Purdie Shuffle], and I wanted to do something with that video. I recorded myself on top of him playing, and that was the first thing I did with the YouTube videos. I loved it. I was using YouTube videos, and then the idea of mixing a couple of them together came to me. I started again. The first thing I did was take the Bernard Purdie video, and started from that.
Do you run the videos through processing, clean up the sound, or modify them?
A little bit at the end, but not too much. That’s also a process that Sabo does. Ninety-nine percent of things I do, even now, go to Sabo when I finish. He mixes and does post-production—but mixing mostly—he gave it his touch to the Thru You videos, too.
The Princess Shaw story is beautiful. Has she been to Israel?
Yeah, a couple of times. She came to the kibbutz. It was like two worlds collide. It was amazing.
Did she come with other people?
No, by herself. We did a couple of shows with the Kutiman Orchestra, and featured her for a couple of songs. We did a couple of things with her. The whole thing with the film was a really amazing experience. Traveling together to film festivals, it was really an unforgettable experience. I am really fortunate.
Are you still in touch with her?
I am not really in touch with her, but Ido Haar, the film maker, is in touch with her. From time to time we send a message. She’s working and trying to make it in the music industry, which is not easy at all.
Are those videos what led to your cities projects?
The first one was.
And those videos aren’t mashups of pre-existing videos, but original footage. How did it work? Did you film buskers and then cut-and-paste afterwards?
Exactly. Sometimes, with the later videos, I would get lazy and give them a click in their ear. They would play on time, and then it is easy [laughs]. But in the first ones, I wanted to be pure. I told them to play whatever they wanted, and then put them together. That is more or less the process.
Do you see the video as an important component? Do these songs stand alone or is it important to have the visual aspect as well?
I think it goes together. While editing, I’ll sometimes make decisions based on the music, and sometimes based on the video. But sometimes I make the decisions based on the music, too. It goes together.
Are those city videos what led to the project in Tanzania?
Yeah, they invited me to Tanzania to do the same thing. I did the first one with Jews, and then I started to get invitations to do these in different cities. Tanzania was one of them. I was invited by a travel agency to do the same thing there. I went there, and filmed many tribes and musicians. When I came back, I felt a couple of things: One was that it was such beautiful material that I didn’t just want to do a mix of Tanzanian music and sum it all up in five minutes. I wanted to do something that, for me, is deeper. The other thing was that they all play. Some of the instruments they played don’t even have scales [or fixed pitches], they just play it. You can’t really ask, “Play something at 120 BPM in D minor.” It doesn’t work like that. The material was too complicated to put together, and I felt that deserved something deeper. I started playing with it the same way as I did with that first Bernard Purdie video, playing with the samples, and that’s what came about.
That seems to be how you operate. You go wherever the energy leads you. Is that right?
Definitely. Even when I think I know exactly what I want to do, I go into the studio, and something else happens. With most of the music, a lot of times I am just trying to imitate something. I think, “I want to do something like Fela Kuti,” for example, and something else happens.
Was that the process behind your ambient album, too? It seems like a departure from the other music you do.
When I did the Africa thing, Wachaga, which was in 2014, I was listening to a lot of jazz and spiritual jazz, and it went that way. I started to listen to more avant-garde stuff, and then started listening to ambient and Indian music. Ambient music, which no story telling, just mood, and I was really into it. I wanted to do my own take on it, which is what happened. I am releasing a new ambient album soon, too, called Surface Currents [full album is due out on April 2].
What do you mean by spiritual jazz, like 1960s-era John Coltrane?
I am really bad with the names. I’ll just start with say, Alice Coltrane, and it will take me wherever it wants. Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane obviously, and all the gang around them. I don’t have the spirit of a music collector. I don’t have even one record. I never remember names. If I like something, I press like on Spotify or YouTube or whatever, and it will play it again for me.
Wild. I’d think that someone who does work with samples would have a wall full of records at home. But you don’t even have a turntable.
No not at all. And also, in my music, there is not even one sample. People think I make music the same as I do with the YouTube videos. The YouTube thing is only samples, but in my music I never sample anything.
Is it all either performances from yourself or someone else?
Yes. I never sample. Maybe drums on my first album—maybe a drum loop—but other than that, I don’t do that at all. I don’t sample anything.
How did you end up in Tze’elim?
It was in 2013. I had enough. At that time I had been in Tel Aviv for 12 years, and I just said, “enough.” The big city is not for me. I wanted to move to somewhere quiet and peaceful. I actually came to Tze’elim for two months to take a break, and I never went back.
Do you have a studio there?
Not in my house, it’s like another room.
What do you have, a lot of analog outboard gear, or do you work primarily in the box (in the computer)?
Both, but mostly outboard gear. I have plenty of synths, some drum machines, and a lot of acoustic instruments. It’s mostly not in the box. I am not really into plugins and stuff like that. Not because I have anything against it, I am not a purist. It’s just that Sabo—we used to lived together—and he had a lot of vintage synths. He brought me into the world of loving vintage instruments and analog gear. I have a lot of toys.
The workflow is different, too, when your fingers are on the buttons as opposed to in the computer.
Definitely, and a lot of the time—like if you do an A-B test with me between the plugin and the real thing—I would never know the difference. It’s just something in that it’s exciting to turn a knob, or to buy a box with knobs and lights and meters, rather than just a plugin. That’s what does it for me.
Plus, your hands are on it and it stimulates the creative process. You’re touching it.
It’s also a childhood dream to be in a studio with a lot of equipment and cables and stuff [laughs].
Photos courtesy of Kutiman
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