Vidi and Tomer of Subterranean Masquerade (English Version)
par Jasmin Hammon et Felix Hammon (28/04/2019)

You move around a lot on tour. How much of a Vagabond or a Nomad are you?
Tomer : Right now, we are, very much.
Vidi : Hm... yes...
But you seem to enjoy it, from your posts on Facebook?
Vidi : Yeah, I think it's mainly, this band is about cherishing the road, a lot, and for me, personally, it is also about some research and experimentation about longing. So, the further we go, the more countries that we see and cities we see, as musicians, I feel that it makes us develop as artists. Also it answers some questions about identity, from where we come from. So, comparing, it's a good experience.
So, would you say, the further you are away from your home, the more you feel who you are, or how do you experience traveling? When you say “identity”?
Tomer : Well for me, I guess, first of all, I travel differently from each part of the band. But for me, the more I am further away from home, the more I miss what there is left behind. So, let's say, if I woke up the first morning in the bus, you know, just missing a little bit of my wife and my children and my work and my dogs and cats. The more time goes by, I also come to realize, that life had a proportion, you know. So everything we do is great, but obviously, there is no place like home and home is where your heart is. And it's a good perspective, to know, to visit stages all over Europe and to see thousands of fans and the comfortable feeling that there is a place to come back to. That there is a home! Our music is very much talking about identity, and looking for identity, and finding out who you are. And touring in Europe for such an extended period of time is giving you a perspective of what is important. Each on it's own.
What are your musical backgrounds and how did you get into contact with music in your life? Did you study, or did you have idols in your childhood?
Vidi : That's a good question!
Tomer : Yeah!
Vidi : You want to start?
Tomer : Yes. You see this t-Shirt?
Yeah!
Tomer : So, I'm wearing my Nirvana t-shirt which I got recently. But my first recollection as a teenager was seeing Nirvana doing the MTV Awards, it must have been 1990 something, and crashing the guitar, and I was sitting at my grandparent's house, it was the night of Passover I think, and I was thinking then, “I want to be like that!”. And they looked at me, saying, “You are crazy!”. “No, I wanna be like that!”. And a few days after, I started into listening more to music, more Nirvana and Guns and Roses. And right now I am doing a 300 people show in Lyon where I wear my Nirvana t-shirt. And this is exactly “follow your idols”. Because for me, Nirvana is not only a great garage band. For me it is just a moment in time, when I decided that I want to dedicate my life to make music, to spread it to people, to do it my own way. Obviously, we are not breaking guitars on stage and we are probably not gonna win a MTV Award any time soon, but at least on a low scale, we are able to fulfill dreams which is great! You know, I feel lucky! For doing it.
How about you?
Vidi : Ehm … Well, as long as I remember myself, it was always about performance. And ehm … where I grew up, it didn't really fit what I liked or what I loved doing and how I liked to do things didn't completely fit to the social circle around me. So I was always kind of an outsider. And ehm … when I was around 12 or 13 years old, I was listening to a lot of music before, but when I was 12 or 13, I remember that I was starting getting more into metal music and I've been living in a city called Haifa, it's a port city, at the Mediterranean sea in Israel, with a port, and above us, above the city, there were two cities which are Druze cities which is a very very very interesting religion. They believe in reincarnation and things like that. And one of my best friends was from there and he was very much into black metal. And both of us, all we ever wanted was, those years, was to be vikings. So we would usually spend our time sitting in the forest and you know trying to connect to things, but eventually we went back home and look in the mirror and we were not tall enough and not blond enough to be vikings. And this thing started like ticking in my brain, like, so, what can I do to make Western music, not just black metal, but rock'n'roll, punk, my own. Like, I don't wanna be some sort of a replica or a simulacra of something. I am fine with echoing old ideas, but I wanna do it via my own vehicle and my own geographic identity. So I started to make more experimental music during my teenhood and I got deeper and deeper to this part. And yeah, eventually, what I am trying to understand, and I think it happens from a band to a band, project to project, show to show, is this mash up that we have in the Middle east, this mash up that we have in Israel of where we are from, or who we are or what we are. So I got deeper and deeper into hardcore and deeper and deeper into performance on one side, but I always felt like it has to have a certain meaning. Like when I see Nirvana, this is amazing for me, Nirvana is a great band … I wanna see the Nirvana of the Middle East. That's like one of the reasons why I am doing what I do.
That's super interesting and answers some of the questions that I have, because you already mentioned the mash up of cultures is Israel and also your music has many different influences, there are Indian influences, European influences, different kinds of Oriental influences. And you already mentioned the question of what is metal and yeah about your childhood and your teenager years you said it's more like the viking metal. Yeah, recently I discussed with an Indian student of mine the question about what does metal stand for and he said that he likes metal but he doesn't like is that it's a white culture. What would you say about that?
Tomer : What do you mean by white culture?Yeah, “it's music from white people to white people”?
Felix : That the background of the music is the baroque and the classical music more than other music.
Vidi : I can see his point, but I disagree. I can see his point but I disagree, because, first of all, historically, we don't need to go very very far back in the past to see that a lot of North African culture is within this music.
Tomer : All the blues, rock'n'roll, I think is obviously African culture.
Vidi : African culture is there. Tribalism is there. I think, that's kind of hard, I'll try to be, I hope to say it correctly, I try to explain... I am only speaking on behalf of myself … I think that for someone of the outside, that do not fully get it, it can seem … that some elements of it, in certain contexts, could be … I'm looking … trying to find the right word here … I'll start from the end. We are touring for the second time with Orphaned Land now, and the crowd is very diverse, the crowd is very heterogenic, we see people from all over the world, we see people with different skin colors, we see people with different styling, we see people with different ages, so, on the map where we exist right now, maybe somewhere else, it's not like that, but we, what we are experiencing right now, I wouldn't say that metal is only a white culture at all. Plus, I don't identify myself as a white person. So, for me, I can't say it's a white culture, that's it's only a white culture when I'm part of this culture and I am both consuming this culture and creating this culture. So I think that maybe 20 years ago, it was more kind of segregated, not in a racist way, just you know maybe in Europe, more people had ways to listen to this music rather than in other places in the world and now with the Internet and everything, everything breaks down. The entire, and this again goes to this mashed up identity, so, I think that metal more than anything is folk music. I think also that Judas Priest, all this is folk music. We have a tribe, we hear a story, we connect to the story, we come each night to the concert, to the venue, to scream together, to cheer together, it's almost like a church. When people just come together, and I think what we are trying to do is, well, to bring messages that are not as dark. And I think that once you dismantle, dismember, this darkness part, you use it as a tool, but this is not the main thing, the main message. You can create amazing protest, you can create amazing ideas with the people. It's not about rebellion as much as it is about freedom. And yeah, I don't know … I feel like I'm saying a lot of things … but not like touching the … I disagree, I don't think it's a white culture, because we don't come … we come from an immigrant geography.
Yeah, maybe that's one of the points that you mentioned that today it's easier to access music from other places. Also, the metal scenes in other countries and parts of the world are growing like in the North of Africa, Tunesia, or for example in Indonesia there are important bands nowadays and from Israel …
Vidi : Yeah! They have huge festivals there in Indonesia! Also Mongolia is becoming bigger and bigger. I have some friends that came back now, an Israeli band that performed there at grindcore festival in Ulaanbaatar. So it's everywhere, it's everywhere.
Maybe like you say metal is more like a message that unites people?
Vidi : That's what we want. That's what I want to believe. Not only metal, but it's music.
Because your music is not only metal, there are so many different influences. Also Indian influences that I would hook into, how did this influence get into your music – because from a Central European perspective, the Middle East, in Germany, is the “Orient” and from the anglo-saxon point of view, India is the “Orient” and others would even say it's Japan or the Far East is the “Orient”. So what is the “Orient” for you? Does it exist …?
Tomer : What is the Orient?!
Vidi : I love your questions.
Tomer : Yes, it's interesting questions. What is the Orient for us …?
Or does it exist?
Vidi : When we say “Orient”, do we mean a terminology of whatever that is on the East? That's what we mean?
Yeah, do you feel part of the Orient, or is there something else? Because you get labeled, your music often gets labeled “Oriental metal”.
Vidi : Yeah, but we have to remember, we have to remember, maybe it sounds a bit sarcastic, but we have to remember, that in order to .. for labels, for record companies, in order to sell something, they need to brand it a certain way. So, when a label manager says, okay, that is “Oriental metal”, then, a guy who is looking for a different sound, knows, ah that is what they are talking about.
Tomer : You can't categorize everything that is not … that is unique or different, talking different languages, as “Oriental”. Nowadays, it can be everything.
Vidi : I am speaking a Semitic language, I am speaking Hebrew, I know a little bit of Arabic, because of my Arabic friends, but this is my language. My … I was born in Israel, on purpose, my grandparents and my parents did not speak in any other language other than Hebrew. My mother's side is from Romania, from close to the Moldovan border. My father's side is from Poland and if you see my father, he has … we don't look the same. And they live in Poland by the Russian border. Before that, part of my family was living in Constantinople. Before that, it was other places. I was born in a new country. All we consume on television, is American television mostly. Now with Netflix, we have little more European content, but … when I grew up, I grew up in a secular family, no-one really talked to me about religion at all. My grandparents were traditional, they were going to the synagogues and doing everything, but … so, it's very hard for me to say, this is Oriental. Or that is different, because, you know, you grow up in a street where people talk five different languages, with different accents, you grow up in a street where you have people who are speaking Arabic and Hebrew at the same time and communicating, by the way, very good where I come from, for me, I feel the Orientalism, when I get to Europe! Because this, for me this is the different rhythm, the different culture, different food, different smell, and I like it here. But this is when I feel, okay, this is for me …
The exotic?
Vidi : The exotic! This is exotic for me. Maybe it's less colorful, it's not like Aladdin with all the colors and the desert and dadadadaaa [sing a little melody]. Well, I was listening to rock'n'roll and metal and I wanted to be distinct. But I'm not. I'm both!
hat's very interesting what you say, it's getting in the direction of I was thinking, because the ideas that we have in Europe from the “Orient” are strongly shaped by the colonial times. Especially, what we call “the Middle East”, comes from the colonial times, when the British and French emperors were present there. So, there's always this European filter, you see … today we say “filter”, European interpretation of what is “the Orient” and of course it gets distorted and parts of what the cultures have there get filtered by the European perspectives. So for me it's very interesting what you say, that you cannot say that there is some kind of … yeah … a concept
Vidi : Yeah, I don't want to serve a concept, I want the concept to be shaped by whoever we are. I think it's the right of every person to be who he is and the aura of it, people can give it other names, but …
Yeah, you already mentioned that music, or metal in your case, wants to, that you want to spread a positive message, like something light and beautiful, and make people happy. And in one of your songs, Place for Fairytales, [...] you say “a lighthouse in a time of storm” - What kind of storm do you mean, what kind of lighthouse?
Tomer : Well, I wrote all the lyrics for the album Vagabond in the North of India. I was taking a break pretty much from everything and backpacking and taking a guitar and I went to do my own isolation time, yoga, a diet of Indian food and or me the place for fairy tales was this small village I lived in in India, this is the place for me, almost like it came out of a fairy tale, from a story. Everything is, you need to see it, everything is just green, and light hearted and people seem to be happy and care about each other even if they don't know you, and you get to have a nice conversation with people and you have good food and good inspiration. So for me the lighthouse in a time of storm was the place I was at a certain time, right in the lyrics. This is what I needed in my life, just to get everything back on track, take a break, this is the place which is the place for fairy tales.
Yeah, it's super interesting! I was just wondering, because in Europe, sometimes you get the impression, that Israel is just a chaotic place on Earth where there is only violence happening, so yeah, I was thinking about that when I read “the time of storm”.
Tomer : It's not true by the way!
Yes, that's what I guessed!
Tomer : Israel is many other things aside from what you see on television. See, I live in the North of Israel, very very up North, I get nothing from what you see, I don't feel it, I never hear about it, I think that if you're on trip, people would treat you nice too. It's just that … even in a place where you feel like home, with all the, … work and family and friends and the band, everything else in your life, it doesn't matter, even if you are at the nicest place on Earth, sometimes you just need to stand up, get out and be in a different place to get the resolution again. Same about touring, get the resolution again in shaping your identity and longing.
Yeah, that's what I guessed and it's also something that I hear in your music, which isn't depressive or dark which are also prejudices against metal, but there are lighthearted moments in your music and joyful melodies in contrast with dark growls, a very interesting contrast by the way. I'm really excited to see it on stage later, how it sounds.
Vidi : We are looking forward to play for you.
I'm ready for that! And also the song Nomad … where is the “city of burning lights” and also “the immense bridge connects two parts”. Which two parts?
Tomer : Well, it's actually Rishikesh, a city in India. It is a city in India, it's a very spiritual, religious city and the lake is actually the Ganges. The Ganges flowing around and there is a bridge and there is two sides of the city. One side just takes you up North, out. And then the other side where you see all the temples. For me looking at this, it was really kind of, how you divide the things, because if you cross the bridge, you can go on your own way, you can go wherever you want and then if you're going on the other side of the bridge, it is where you have to be part of what the city is. And in this place, Rishikesh is the place where the Beatles wrote the White Album, so it's a very interesting place and I've been staying there for a while. And this whole song is talking about the morning prayer, what they call the puja, okay, it's a very very musical, beautiful morning prayer where they take flowers and throw it in the river and I was very impressed by it, because it is a very religious ceremony, obviously I'm not Hindu, but seeing it from the outside, seeing how they take flowers and put it in the water, kind of the meaning … the meaning, it touched my heart and I wanted to write about it. Like I say, in Hymn of the Vagabond, I say “I write for the see”, in the tour diary, because, the idea, I write what I see. This is what I saw at the time. So, the city, the people coming from one side to the other and you could see the businessmen walking to the other side just to get to work and the spiritual people coming with all the flowers and incent [sticks], and it's a strong, it's divided so strongly, there's the strong separation between everyday's life and how spiritual man can get and sometimes you see that people go to work and drive and they wear their nice clothes and they're not feeling, they don't look very happy and on the other hand you see this hunchback, or beggar, or a nomad, okay, they have nothing, apart of his freedom, and he does what he does and he is happy and feels satisfied and it's question about how much more we need to have as humans, how much more finances, how much more materials, how much more nice clothes, how much more new guitars, to be happy. Sometimes you don't need to have anything …
Erm … guitars …
Tomer : Yeah, you know what I mean, it's always the question between carrying your luggage with you or like a nomad and have nothing. I met people who got absolutely nothing. And what they do is to travel from one place to another and that makes them so happy and it makes me question myself, how much I need to be happy. And sometimes it's not about the material, sometimes it's just the melody inside.
Yeah, and the way you write about that makes it really sound like fairy tales. There are so many imageries in your texts, in your lyrics, very much imagination, so, would you say that your music and your lyrics are at the limits between reality and fiction, or?
Tomer : Yes! Always! It always is. We talk about … the album talks about the woodpecker, the nomad, and people ask what is this woodpecker. So, the woodpecker is that voice inside, it goes like this all the time [knocks against the wall]. It says to me, it's time to get up and fulfill my dreams, it's time to make a change for myself, to become the man I want to be. But then again, everyday's life, it's not a fairy tale. And you need to. People got to do what they got to do. So it's always the conflict about living the dream, or being tied, the boundaries, the chains, of what you need to do.
Vidi : The conflicts.
And you are not very long in the band, you are relatively new, so, how did you get into the band, was it like your dream to get there, or how did this happen?
Vidi : I had my … I am a full time musician, so I have different projects and different bands and like Tomer just mentioned, I'm kind of afraid of having things, objects and stuff, so for the last five years, I didn't really have a home. I was traveling wherever there is an interesting musical project and about two years ago I got a phone call from Tomer and I know Subterranean Masquerade, obviously, and I know their very early experimental albums and when I got this phone call, I was substituting for the Norwegian singer, the original singer Kjetil Nordhus, who I think is marvelous. I grew up with listening to Green Carnation and Tomer just called if I wanna pop up for a jam and things started going since that moment and I got to be exposed deeper into the lyrics' meaning and deeper into the concept, the spiritual part next to the rock'n'roll part and that rock'n'roll actually is spiritual and for me it was like bang! What I needed. We started form there, now we are just almost done recording our new album, that we have called Mountain Fever, and it's gonna continue the concept of the last one, but if the first album, the album Vagabond, was about writing from while being away, now this one is about writing while being at the place you identify as your home base. Still, being in conflict with longing.
Okay, that's exciting news that you break here! Good to know that something new is coming soon.
Vidi : Right after the summer!
Tomer : Very soon! It's an amazing album. I can say without Vidi hearing it, that the biggest difference between the albums we did and the new one is that Vidi is actually writing the lyrics now and vocal melodies and he is doing it much better than me. So, we can say it's definitely our best album and we are very looking forward to everybody to listen to it and enjoy it as much as we enjoy making it.
Which means that maybe next year, there will be the next tour?
Vidi : We are already working on this.
Wonderful! That's great!
Vidi : We are already working and we get so much good feed backs from crowds around here, also on the last tour, but it seems that … as long as we are being honest on stage as much as possible and not making like a show, but being ourselves and giving everything we have, I think this energy it starts bouncing. I hope you will see it tonight. Every night, it's a different culture, right?
Don't feel under pressure now!
Vidi : No no no, we are being ourselves anyhow. We are gonna being ourselves anyhow.
Okay, last question, because we are already running out of time. My last two questions would be, what are your favorite ways of traveling and what is the most exotic place you've been to?
Vidi : You go?
Tomer : I go? My favorite way of traveling would probably be the train.
Okay?
Tomer : yeah, I think that I don't like airplanes very much, it's not that I don't trust them, it's just all the airport security, and just sitting there for a long time, it's making me ache and the train is probably the nicest way for me to travel and the most exotic place? I've been to many exotic places. What is the most exotic place we've been to?
Vidi : Together?
Tomer : Well, … I've been to a very small village by the boarder of Tibet, I've been doing a track, a very long track, listening to U2, and I've been to a very small village, where there is nothing beside of this old woman making butter tea from yak milk, you know what yak is? So, this has been the furthest away from maybe Western civilization, so there is absolutely nothing except for a small Buddha temple and that old woman with no teeth making yak butter milk, it's a strong smelly, salty, buttery tea. Yeah, I guess that's the one, that's the place.
And for you?
Vidi : Any vehicle that has windows is okay [laughs]. I sleep very good on airplanes. I don't sleep anywhere good, but on airplanes somehow it's okay, but I'd rather go with anything that has windows. I think the most exotic place I've been to … I have two places in my mind. One, I was doing some sort, I was giving vocal workshops above the Arctic sea on an island in the North of Norway, and you have to take three airplanes there and then a boat and then there's huge mist and cross through the mist and it looks like Kong's island, only everything is arctic. And so then there is one big big rock in the middle and I've been living there in a fisherman's hut for a while and I met there a man who was, like in his eighties, a sailor, that since he was 15 years old, he was a sailor and he couldn't really speak English, but he used to draw me every morning all kind of creatures he claims that I could find on the island. So, there were a lot of nymphs there,
Tomer : [laughs]
Vidi : Seriously! And there was … I couldn't go to a certain side of the island, when the tide was low, because, they believe there, even though it is like modern society, they still believe there is an evil sea spirit over there and I was not allowed to go there. So I would just stand there at the place where I could and I would just listen to the wind and the wind was screaming. It was very cool, I wrote a lot of music there. And the other place that I think about is a place in Israel, called Tzefat.
Tomer : Tzefat?!
Vidi : Tzefat. Which I think is very exotic. It's the city of Kabbala, of mystical Judaism, and a lot of weird stories are going on there and the cemetery has weird Rabbis buried there and everything is painted in blue against the evil eye and mostly Jewish orthodox and -
Tomer : Very strange!
Vidi : Very strange. And a lot of people that believe there is a thing in Judaism about intention. That everything that you do, if you intend to do it, full heartly, it would make the world a better place. And, they have caves there, where you can go through the city and suddenly hear music and get into a small cave that is like hundreds of years old and you can find just a man by himself and just playing music in order to bring sparks and holiness out of the ground and it's close by to where I live, but I think I was there like maybe four times my entire life, but this is, I think it's pretty exotic.
Tomer : Yeah, it's mostly strange.
Vidi : I like it, I like strange!
Tomer : All kinds of strange people.
Maybe that's what exotic makes .. strangeness. Otherness maybe.
Vidi : Yeah, maybe.
It's super interesting to talk with you.
Vidi : It was really nice. You had great questions.
Tomer : Great questions! Very, very thoughtful. Wow. Thank you for the liquor and everything else.
Thank you very much for your time and your patience! And your help!
Vidi : It's our pleasure. Thanks also Felix.