Alongside artists with long careers and artists who broke into consciousness more than a decade ago, the ACUM Awards ceremony held last night marked and approved the creators of the current generation of musicians.
Among names such as Izhar Ashdot and Rami Kleinstein, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the event, and Peer Tessy, winner of the "Album of the Year Achievement" award (together with Eitan Darmon), names such as Yarden Peleg and Paul Trunk also stood out. The first, known to most of the audience as Jordi, was one of the writers of Anna Zack's huge hit "Go to sleep", for which he received the statuette of "the most played Israeli work of the year". Paul Trunk, the ensemble led by Gal Nisman, returned home with the award in the "Song of the Year Achievement" category for "Settle on the Kibbutz" they wrote and performed together with rapper Jimbo Jay.
Jordi receives the ACUM Prize, photo: Coco
Honoring several generations of artists and creators, this year's ceremony was a purposeful display of the current Israeli musical offering (and one Harry Styles, who brought Universal Israel the award for most played foreign composition for the song "As It Was").
"I won't say it surprised me, because we already knew during the year that this song was successful and played a lot," Peleg says. "But as soon as they call and tell you that a song you wrote is the Israeli song that was played the most times this year, it's really exciting. I'm a signatory to quite a few things, but we really never get used to the thought that things we do in a small room in Kiryat Ata reach the whole country and everyone hears them. It's not a given."
Jordi's achievement (along with Ron Bitton and Itai Shimoni) is even more incomprehensible when one takes into account that he, shall we say, hardly happened. "The funny thing, and here's something people don't know, is that this song was originally without the whole 'go to sleep' thing," Jordi reveals. "I mean, the house ended with, 'Don't text me at night,' and from there it went straight to 'Let's see what you missed.' That was the song in the beginning! Everyone said 'it's fire' and I felt it wasn't that, it wasn't there yet. When we met for the second session, somehow the part of 'Are you awake? Go to sleep.' Ron Bitton completed it straight to 'Let's Go Out - In a Dream' and that became the central part of the song. The demo of the song was initially called 'Come and See.'"
"This song is kind of an exit, musically and atmosphere-wise." "Settle on the Kibbutz" , Photo: Shlomi Pinto
"Stalbet on the Kibbutz", the hit of the year by several radio stations, was born almost by chance. And whoever of the band's fans thought on first listen that it was a song that did not represent Paul Trunk's body of work was more right than they thought. "The album 'Mammoth,' from which the song is written, is a very heavy and personal album," says Nisman. "This song was supposed to be some kind of counterpoint to this heavy album. He really is a kind of exit, musically and atmosphere-wise. I live on a kibbutz in the south, this is really my life. When I was looking for something to write about, I looked out the window and said, 'Well, I have a great topic here.' It had no pretensions to be anything more."
But the success of the song does not signal a new direction for the ensemble. "Never," he says. "I'm trying to make music that we'll enjoy, real in terms of text. She is never committed to a particular style. I'm never trying to make a hit."
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