Fatali, aka Eitan Carmi, exploded into our consciousness in ‘03 with his
debut album ‘Moments’. A pivotal album it marked a definite point at which Israeli trance began to diversify and move into deeper, and as yet for them, uncharted territory. Ironically though it was the British based label Alchemy Recs that first discovered Fatali.
Ringing Eitan at some ungodly hour on a Sunday morning, one has to take into
account time zone differences across the globe, I was immediately brought
into life by his effervescence. But then at the age of twenty what else would you expect? This fact shocked me. I had no preconception about age but didn’t expect that. Eitan has a musical talent that goes beyond the folly of youth and immediately managed to knock out a good half dozen questions off my list. After all it is pointless to ask a twenty year old who has already been in the industry for five years what he did before he started the Fatali project. Probably trying to sneak a smoke behind the bike sheds and talk about girls would have been his answer had I actually have asked that question.
Eitan is music. It’s the force that drives him and has driven him since a
very early age when he first started to mess around with sound and musical
arrangement. The move into trance was a natural one for him as it has been
for the majority, if not all, of the native Israeli artists. Trance is the
unofficial sound of Israel; it is all that is heard in the bazaars and markets. For a significant proportion of the artists their first contact was
via this direction and it was only sometime later in their lives that they
got to experience a full-on psychedelic rave. This was not the case with
Eitan when I asked him when he went to his first party. With a giggle he
answered “12”. I didn’t dig any deeper but it was fairly obvious from the
tone of his voice that he didn’t stay up with just his own natural energy.
To make it as a trance artist one has to work hard. One has to take
rejection, ridicule (“this isn’t live, it’s on a computer!”) and a life of
perennial poverty; there is no money in trance land - hippies are too busy
spending their money on pot, psychedelic pants and acid. Naturally as with
all upper echelons there are exceptions and usually these people have worked
damn hard to get to where they are; names like Man with No Name, Hallucinogen, and on the Israeli theme, Infected Mushroom spring to mind. It is, or seemingly was, without exception that at the beginning they would have to chase the record deals. Menial jobs within the industry have sometimes greased the wheels, I think of Simon Posford being a tape operator in a studio and Martin Freeland as a press man for Sigue Sigue Sputnik. But with Eitan it is almost as if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Don’t get me wrong, I am not being dismissive of the talent Eitan has or the work he’s done, but in all my years of writing about trance I have never heard of a record company making the first move and immediately offering a three album deal to an artist who is still in his teens and has only just recorded his first album on a label completely outside of the Israeli umbrella. Yet this is exactly what BNE did, these kinds of deals only exist amongst the rock bands, or at least that is what I thought. Clearly BNE picked up on Eitan’s extraordinary talent early on and offered a deal that no one could refuse. Work for BNE and you have a job for life. They organise contracts, tours, hotels, advance fees, flights etc. leaving the artist do what they are best at doing - making music.
With a deal like Eitan’s it is not therefore unreasonable to have high
expectations of the music he produces and Eitan, as Fatali, has just
released the first of his series of three albums on BNE simply entitled
‘Faith’. He assures me that not only does it follow the lines set out by
Moments, i.e. uplifting morning trance but it also incorporates influences he
has been exposed to since, namely one of reggae. Reggae has recently
captivated Eitan and at some point he wishes to produce more of it. This
could be closer on the horizon than we envisage, after all we are talking
about the label that took an unprecedented risk and released Violet Vision
with their highly manicured ‘Indie’ sound.
In Hebrew Fatali means ‘my destiny’. However we have to credit Eitan’s
sister for that very appropriate name. After all they do say that family
know us better than we do.
