FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Vaadat Charigim Is Ready for the End

Tel Aviv’s Juval Haring is so sure that the world is about to end that he started a shoegaze band and recorded an album about the upcoming nuclear blast.

Tel Aviv’s Juval Haring is so sure that the world is about to end that he started a shoegaze band and recorded an album about the upcoming nuclear blast. Living in Israel, Haring (who was also in TV Buddhas) doesn’t see much hope for the future. Israel’s economy is declining, the music scene is too small to support full time artists, and at every border are people who hate them at best, and want to blow them up at worst. That’s why his band, Vaadat Charigim, is about to release The World Is Well Lost (out January 21), which is eight tracks of thick, sludgy, massive, gloom and doom. There are also a few happy songs.

Advertisement

But despite the coming nuclear era, Haring is doing his best to celebrate the here and now, touring with his band, trying to grow the underground music scene in Tel Aviv, and drinking a certain Chinese alcohol that tastes like airplane de-greaser.

I called Haring to see how long I’ve got to get a sixer before nuclear warfare fries my organs.

VICE: Is a sudden, apocalyptic conflict a certainty?
Juval Haring:I’m pessimistic, normally. I think you need to enjoy the time you have and do the right thing right now as much as you can. But, I think most of the time we are going to a worse place all the time, from the moment that civilization began. I think we are declining all the time.  So, to answer your question: Yes, I think it is inevitable.

Why did you base your album around that concept?
It’s not like a movie, where it has a plot. It’s more like when you live in this region, you have a constant conflict and constant tension in the air all the time. It’s not just a tension between them and us—you don’t know if you have a financial or geographical future.

My parents, they were the building generation of this country and they keep looking at it and thinking, Is this thing going to survive the next 50 years? Financially, we are slowly becoming bankrupt and privatized, just like the States. Here, it is more extreme because in the beginning of Israel we were very socialist due to influence from Russian and European concepts.

Advertisement

We are getting more and more privatized and more bankrupt. People are becoming poorer, and it’s getting really hard to live here. The tension that you feel all the time—I chose to express it as an end of the world scenario, and the album is called The World Is Well Lost. The songs are about fatal, end of the world things, but also the present, as in: I have no future. I don’t even know if it’s post-apocalyptic, it’s just apocalyptic—it deals with feeling that the end of the world is now.

There is a line in one of your songs where you wonder what music you’ll listen to during the apocalypse. I found that funny—out of all the concerns you could have had, you were worried about the soundtrack to your death.
What I was trying to say is that when you live in Israel, the amount of bad things happening to you… it becomes kind of like a natural thing. I thought of it like seasons. Seasonally, you think, What am I going to wear when it gets cold? What kind of hits will I listen to in the summer? So, like, when missiles fall, which is inevitable, I just thought something along the lines of, Well, what am I going wear?

Should we prepare for doom during these last few days or should we all get drunk and have sex with each other?
You should party. I try to have as much fun as I can. I work all the time. It’s not like I just get in a van and drive to a show. I work day and night. Wherever I can, I try to have fun. Even though I’m not making any money—and won’t save any money or buy a house—I’m having fun.

Advertisement

Why did you decide to sing strictly in Hebrew instead of mixing it up with other languages that might make your music more accessible to an international audience?
In Israel, everyone who is trying to make music is singing in English. That’s fine. I don’t have criticism on that. But it is a choice. There is a big difference when you write in your head in your own language—there is a cognitive depth that you are able to reach. You can probably reach a certain depth when you write in English, but when I write in Hebrew I feel like I reach a more real, exciting place.

Do you ever feel pressure to conform to Western ideas of music?
I toured Europe for five or six years straight. I did like 1000 shows. We lived off of the tour. What I noticed about American bands and English-speaking bands was that there was a sort of unspoken superiority to them.

Really?
Yeah, there was a natural kind of feeling… the US is where underground music mostly originates—where the important press is. So the sense of promoters in Europe is that they take those bands more seriously. If you are being kind of Americanized, it really helps. You can’t just be any band from the US, but it definitely helps. I’m trying to break the rules—but what I’m doing right now, interviewing with you, goes against that. With the Hebrew, though, I’m saying no to Western-centric rock.

Is there an identifiable underground music scene in Tel Aviv?
It wasn’t really identifiable four or five years ago, but me and a few people have been creating mini-festivals for this kind of music and some festivals have arisen around that. There is a good stage for people who are into shoegaze and dream pop.

You play at a club called Zimmer, where they serve a special Chinese drink. Tell me about that.
It’s a liquor. I was working on airplanes when I was younger, and if you wanted to clean grease off a plane you’d use “white spirit,” which is a cleaner with a very high alcohol percentage. The stuff at Zimmer kind of tastes like that tasted when it shot into my mouth by mistake. It’s really strong. I think it’s half poisonous. It gives you a buzz. It’s like weed and alcohol at the same time. It gives you a high.

The World Is Well Lost will be released on January 21 on Warm Ratio Records.