“One of the criteria for judging and evaluating a work of art is its lifespan […]” 

Ami Shavit

From the introductory chapter in the guide:

Over three decades after it was produced, In Alpha Mood, an electro-acoustic album by Israeli conceptual artist Amichai (Ami) Shavit (born in Tel Aviv, 1934), began to generate renewed interest – a stark contrast to the tepid reception it encountered upon its initial release, in 1977. In 2009, the album’s six tracks, totaling 35 minutes, could be heard throughout the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, during the three months of the city’s 2nd contemporary art biennial exhibition. In 2011 it was digitalized and released in CD format as part of “The Culture Club,” a program of events organized for Art Basel Miami Beach. Curated by the editors of Picnic Magazine, who had also curated the biennial, the events showcased a group of artists from Israel at the international art fair. In 2015 the album was reissued on vinyl and made available as a digital download – this time through Finders Keepers Records, a UK imprint specializing in reissues of albums and sound recordings in an eclectic array of genres from around the world. Made possible through the efforts of Ofer Smilansky, an Israeli musician and new media artist based in Belgium, the Finders Keepers reissue exposed the album to a whole new audience of electronica fans throughout the world, and that year the album was listed on The Guardian’s best-of selection of music from the Middle East and North Africa.

In Alpha Mood was created and produced independently by Shavit, who originally released the album on AMIS RECORDS, his eponymous label.[1] While not limited to the six tracks included in the album, any other music he had made during the 1970s never got to be published contemporaneously, and the album remained the imprint’s only release. Shavit had no musical training or background, and in the early 1970s, as he began experimenting with sound and music, he was known primarily as a visual artist, and most of all for his kinetic art. He says that the album, a selection of his music from that time cohesively edited into LP format, was originally intended for a limited edition 5000-copies release, but that the first 500-copy print run eventually became the only edition to come out. Kolinor, one of Israel’s leading recording studios at the time, produced the album’s master copy, and distribution was assigned to Mango, a local distributor that specialized in imports of progressive music from oversees and also operated a record store, at Massaryk Square in Tel Aviv.

Designed by Shavit himself, the album art is markedly progressive and minimal in style, in fitting with the advanced technology through which the music itself had been realized. Issued in a folding format of a double LP, the sleeve shows a graph line running from side to side, colored in a gradient of red, yellow and blue, over a uniform black; the same image is featured on the inner sleeve too, but rendered in black-and-white. The graph element was reworked from Aesthetographs, a print series Shavit was making at the time, based on physiological responses he himself recorded from random subjects who were shown, among others motifs, images meant to echo recognizable works of Israeli art. The electrical-sensor feedback mechanism he used for the task is not unlike that of a lie detector. Once featured on the album cover, however, outside the context of the original print series, it brings to mind the oscillating frequencies of electronic communication signals. The image featured on the album was reproduced in silk-screening, a process realized by the legendary Shohar Press at moshav Beit Herut. Noted for its quality prints, Shohar worked regularly for Israel’s leading graphic artists at the time, among them Dan Reisinger and David Tartakover.

Upon its release, following a fraught and demanding production journey, In Alpha Moodhardly generated any response in the public. In the press, it was mentioned by neither music or art critics, and as no public playing of it was ever held, it remained virtually absent from the cultural landscape in any public sense. Shavit says that out of the album’s eventual 500-copy edition, some of the copies he gave to friends and colleagues, with the rest allotted to a general distribution that was limited in scope to begin with. Parts of the album were later played during “The Bio-Computerized Experience,” Shavit’s 1985 solo show at The White Gallery in Tel Aviv, where the main exhibits consisted of digital-interface interactive art, but again the music hardly gained any meaningful attention, nor mentioned by name. The only reference to it in the press comes from a magazine piece on Shavit by Yotam Reuveny, who after visiting the show described the music as follows: “We sat [together] at The White Gallery. There was a music playing in the air, a piece by Shavit, electronic music, what else. Something reminiscent of Zen music, far-off and otherworldly. From Nepal and India.”[2]Not having been played publicly since, nor mentioned in the press or even in academic research, the album was all but forgotten – up until the 2000s, when a renewed interest began to emerge.

In Alpha Mood was not created for aesthetic purposes per se, nor was it meant to be consumed casually, in passing. A short text on the album’s back cover, in English, makes clear Shavit’s pragmatic intentions as regards the listener, disclosing the underlying motivation that led him to create this piece of experimental music: “[T]he music of this record was stimulated by the theory and practice of biofeedback. It is aimed to create a calm, relaxed, meditative mood associated with alpha brain wave.” Gaining popularity among circles of non-traditional researchers and practitioners of mental health in the 1960s and 1970s, the method known as “biofeedback” makes use of auditory signals that are meant to stimulate the alpha frequencies in the brain’s electric activity, a brainwave associated with an alert state of relaxation. And so, as the album’s title suggests, In Alpha Mood aims to take advantage of the 35-minutes’ encounter with its listeners to generate a beneficial transformation in them, to effect change for the better.

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[1] Some years back, Shavit entrusted his music archive in its entirety to Smilansky, who since has worked to remaster and publish parts of it. So far, two additional albums by Shavit from that period, previously unpublished, have now been released: also on the Finders Keepers imprint, Neural Oscillations and Alpha Rhythms came out in 2018, and 2019 saw the release of Yom Kippur 1973, this time on Sub Rosa, a Belgian label specializing in avant-garde and contemporary music.

[2] The article, which includes an interview with Shavit, was published on the occasion of his gallery show. Yotam Reuveny, “Kochav Shavit,” Yedioth Ahronoth, 3.5.1985 (in Hebrew).