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From the lying traffic sign to the Tel Aviv subway: the dizzying movement of Inbal Perlmutter - voila! culture

2022-09-30T05:42:04.687Z


For the leader of the band of witches, the fast journey and the dangers lurking on the way are an image that repeats itself again and again, and emphasizes the bursting energy of the brilliant creator. At the age of 25 she died


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From the lying traffic sign to the Tel Aviv subway: the dizzying movement of Inbal Perlmutter

For the leader of the band of witches, the fast ride against the background of the dangers lurking on the way is an image that repeats itself over and over again.

It is fascinating and attractive not because it supposedly echoes the disaster on the way, but because it emphasizes the bursting energy that motivated one of the brilliant creators who worked here.

On the 25th anniversary of her death

Nadav Menuhin

30/09/2022

Friday, September 30, 2022, 08:30 Updated: 08:31

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A bright talent.

The Witches (Photo: Flash 90, Moshe Shai)

25 years after her death, the myth of Inbal Perlmutter has not faded even a little.

What the mother witch accomplished before turning 27, many do not accomplish in entire careers.

We're not just talking about the scope, of course, but the power of things;

On the iconic and captivating guitar sound and so recognizable;

The words are so wounded and so brave;

The audacity to write openly about deep pains from the Mitzvahs and to deal with issues that are only beginning to peel off today;

the direct check;

the fantasy and the march into the darkness of the fairy tale world;

the mystery;

the rage;

the bursting charisma and the low and unusual voice;

The wrapping of all these into three minutes of a bittersweet song, which ends with a wink - a masterpiece of rock and roll, made with brilliant talent together with the full partners Yifat Netz and Yael Cohen.



On October 1, 1997, exactly half a year ago, Inbal Perlmutter was killed in a car accident.

It was New Year's Eve.

This bitter end is a terrible tragedy, which the myth also swallowed, as it did to Joplin and Cobain and Hendrix and Elephant and Morrison and Belhassan.

Rock and roll myths are fueled by stars who shine and fade quickly, turning them into martyrs of the art.

It is important to emphasize: it is an aura out of place, which evokes a somewhat disgusting feeling, a wretched romance of disaster, as if there is something in premature death beyond tragedy or some kind of heroic representation.

There's nothing holy or stylish about dying young: it's just pop culture's pathetic way of comforting itself over the death of heroes.

Still, death fascinates the public.

Perlmutter knew this well, and articulated it brilliantly in one of her best solo songs, "Cigarette Light," a track so beautiful that even the noises that adorn it sound like they're happily taking their place.

"When it happened, the whole street stopped to look, because that's the style: it's not the what - but the how," she describes there a violent, blatant and scary death of someone else.



In the case of Perlmutter herself, the how served the myth, which rests on a metaphor in three parts: the journey and forward motion, the loss of control, and the collision - and here you have in four words the entire legend of rock and roll and of the Western counterculture from James Dean onwards.

The unusual, somewhat startling thing is the fact that this is a metaphor that recurs over and over in Perlmutter's own work: the fast travel on the roads and the dangers lurking in them are for her a metaphor for an uncompromising life, but also for survival, and sometimes for self-destruction, for repression, for escapism.

From the angry roads of Israel 2022, full of violence and chaos, it can be determined that in this context too she scored accurately.

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Bursting energy.

The Witches (Photo: Flash 90, Moshe Shai)

It was Micah Sheetrit, perhaps one of the greatest songwriters of the 1990s, who taught Israel that if it is alone then it should be in motion.

Perlmutter's work describes this point of departure again and again, especially in the first album of the Witches and the album "Last Recordings", which was released after her death.

Even before the songs, think about the iconic cover of "Until the next pleasure": about that mysterious bride riding her bicycle up in the sky against the white background, floating alone alone.

His mouth seems to be open, and it is not clear if he is laughing or shouting.

where is she on her way

Does it even matter?

Can she land safely on earth?



She moves alone, cut off from the environment.

In "Walking Quietly", for example, she is indifferent to the hustle and bustle, to the thousands of people running between shops, to the silent bus waiting for tomorrow, to everything that is buzzing around.

In "Fast Travel" from the same album, it is a movement of an experienced person, which perhaps fits the same metaphor better than any other song.

Galloping down the road, she runs away from ignorance, rape, girls, relationships, dreams, temptation and loneliness, but no matter how hard she tries, she is still stuck in the same place.

And how not?

In the bipolar "The Bitter Truth", which is so far from the energetic and almost-cheerful rock in comparison of "Fast Travel", she discovers that the road itself is simply impossible, every road sign lies and every sign is blind, and anyway, despite the well-kept scenery, the road itself is difficult and ugly

And if you go back to other journeys in the songs of the witches, the dizziness is already present, and it is impossible to ignore it.

In the most musical way, this happens in the dash to the sky that reaches the second stanza of "Until the next pleasure", which is all composed with a rhythm that goes crazy, or in the strange description that closes that album, in the punkish "In a little while", about riding a bicycle in a tie and a fishnet hat with a feather, while to lament, muscle contraction and laughter.



Gradually the journey loses direction, and becomes dangerous, and the collision is already inevitable.

In "Black Day" the movement sweeps everything into the abyss, in a whirlwind of emotions;

"True Fear" opens the double collection of the witches with two sentences that together are a punch: "And I wanted to see you today, and I wanted to drive in red."

Horrifyingly, the only song that talks about traffic stopping is "Hindering", where a woman is on a roof, just before jumping, and below the road stops, and only a blue car approaches.



And these are not just the words.

The music of the witches also represented movement, an expressive and fast dance of demons and witches, a dance without rest.

Guitar-bass-drums that open burners together and never look back, sometimes going into turbo mode right in the middle of the song ("Until the next pleasure", "The Agony and the Ecstasy").

It is a dizzying, shaking, confusing and exhilarating musical movement, even with a deep and abysmal sadness at its heart and perhaps precisely because of this.

More in Walla!

15 years without Inbal Perlmutter: what would have happened if she hadn't died?

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The songs did not prophesy themselves and did not predict what happened.

They do not have this quality, and people do not live and die as a metaphor.

The image of galloping on the road is appealing not because it echoes the disaster that was about to happen, but rather emphasizes all the bursting energy that drove one of the brilliant creators who worked here and the spectacular band she led.

The creation on the edge, the intensity, the courage, and the effort to overcome all the obstacles on the way.



These are strange times: in today's tiringly overloaded transportation system, so stuck and congested, so violent and so dangerous, the roads symbolize more than ever the sum total of all the social, economic and human pressures we have to go through on the road every day.

Against this background, the metaphorical sense of suffocation she describes on the road and her attempt to escape from it - has not faded in the slightest.

This is the ultimate existential Israeli image: living on the roads, running away from anxieties, racing forward so as not to get stuck in one place, and sometimes getting lost along the way.



And in general, there is something satisfying in thinking of the music of the witches as a very fast journey, both back in time, to ages that are themselves an emotional roller coaster, and also forward to the future, with the path we have taken since these songs were written and up to the partial awareness - at least - that we have developed since then.

Pay attention, for example, to "The End of the World", which well described already in 1995 the collective blindness in the face of the impending ecological disaster.

We are still waiting for the flood that will wash away in a moment, blind even in the end.

As if we didn't know.

And maybe there are reasons for hope after all.

Coincidentally or not, one of Perlmutter's last songs describes a much more relaxed ride.

The intention is to sing "Caution from the Space", an optimistic and anti-nostalgic confection, with a dream about the Tel Aviv subway.

As of this writing, 25 years after the world lost a brilliant witch forever, even the first Hebrew city's light rail hasn't quite hit the road yet, but maybe, one hopes, something in the near future will be at least a tad cooler.

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Source: walla

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