Composer and Producer of electronic music.
My interest in electronic music has began in the late 90’s. Until then I played electric guitar, as a soloist in a grunge band – “gO gO Monkeys And The Burtoucals”. The band itself still exists and preserves the Jaffa’s Arabs rock culture (and the first of its kind in Jaffa).
The relationship with electronic music officially started when I first went to a club called “LEMON” in Tel Aviv. It was a small club that hosted underground house parties. The Musical style that the club played was hypnotic – gentle, melodic and groovy House with a mixture of jazz and tribal techno. Later on, I started listening to more underground house artists like Kevin Yost, John Aquaviva, Derrick May, Inland Knights, Deep Dish (at that time they all were considered totally advanced underground artists).
Ultimately, the influences came from varied artists and styles like Mr Oizo, Dj Shadow, Chemical Brothers Massive attack LTJ BUKEM, GOLDIE and 4HERO. But, the artist that influenced me the most is Jori Hulkkonen, who produced Tech and Deep House, and his uniqueness was in his rich edits – presenting a lot of sample editing techniques that contributed to the versatility of each track. That versatility later on became a milestone to all my works, that is, there is a general guiding line in each track, yet it stands by itself and has its own ‘personality’.
The final phase of my transition was when I tried to play the guitar solo with a drum loop from an old Casio keyboard. It was connected to an amplifier and speakers in the living room. The drum loop sounded completely digital, and gave a Bossa-Nova rhythm to the clean guitar sound that was driven through a delay ,prior to a wah pedal – the delay was at almost infinite feedback setting ,and was somewhat synced to the loop ,strumming the guitar and slightly bringing the wah to the floor…..HEAVEN.
Then, I decided to buy a bit more sophisticated drum machine (actually everything else from the Casio I had was already a much better option). I went with a tiny groove box from Yamaha named QY70, actually it was nearly the size of a Game Boy, which held a lot of techy sounds on it, effects, drum kits and a full sequencer with 16 MIDI channels that provided me almost everything I wanted in order to start creating electronic music….Truly a remarkable piece of machine.
Towards the end of the millennium, a very important introduction was made with a live performing electronic band called “E-FRONT” whose leaders were Aviad Albert and Binya Reches. The band performed live in front of an audience at a club “Dinamo Dvash” in Tel Aviv, hosting various artists in the electronic music scene – there style was hard and militant Techno ,that was dominated mainly by an avant-garde samples and Dark rhythms.
I had the chance of performing with them once. I was in charge of melodic parts that took place on various parts of the gig – that was the first time I performed live and it was an experience I’ll never forget. The acquaintance with the band helped me redefine the way I make music. The main change was that I started working more on a computer platform rather than groove boxes.
In 2002 I took part in a side project of the Student Film Festival as part of it was devoted entirely to personal diaries – a kind of manifesto of individuals living in Jaffa.
The Drummer from The GO GO MONKEYS, Scandar Copti (a good friend of mine as well) and myself, had to shoot a short diary for the students film festival. While the main goal was a to document a personal diary ,we had to twist the plot a bit by bringing in the narrative of a fabricated superstitious beliefs to a point that every truth have an agenda behind it and by doing that ,we opened an endless discussion of what is the difference between truth and reality. The short film is called cynically “The Truth” and was considered controversial via critics for the reason that it was aimed at the media being manipulative and misleading – of course I took the opportunity to write the music for the film and some of the soundtracks were recorded live, inserted directly in to the shooting while I was playing.
In 2007, Scandar Copti began working on another project, this time it was a full feature film, and he turned to me with a proposal to start working on a soundtrack for the film. Of course I took on the job, and won an Israeli Oscar for Best Original music of the film “Ajami”, in 2009.
These days I am working on an album which includes several styles, such as DnB, Techno, Tech House and Minimal Techno – A Work In Progress.
Rabih Boukhary – 2B Continued Podcast 53 – A Work In Progress
Tracklist
1.Rabih Boukhary – Stop
2.Rabih Boukhary – Techno Cafe
3.Portishead – Strangers (Rabih’s Light Mix)
4.Rabih Boukhary – The Ultrasonic Radio Show
5.Rabih Boukhary -88 Grey Shades
6.Rabih Boukhary – In_Car_Nation
7.Rabih Boukhary – Freak Of The Week
8.Rabih Boukhary – The Orbit Of Neptune
9.Rabih Boukhary – Staring At The Sun
10.Rabih Boukhary – Send Me An Angel (Rabih Substance H771.3 Mix Featuring Eli Sorani)
11.Rabih Boukhary – Sorted Memory
12.Rabih Boukhary – Luigi’s Revenge
13.Rabih Boukhary – Yellow Whale
