It’s 3 pm and Ami Shalev is dangling above a staircase. His minuscule body—built, hairy, and dripping with a mix of sweat and several other liquids he’s poured onto himself—is held up only by the strength of his right hand as his other one occupies the microphone he’s singing into. All around him the hundred or so people who have gathered to see his band, Monotonix, at an in-store performance in the basement of Toronto’s Sonic Boom record store are watching with a mix of amazement and caution. Directly below, intermingled with the mob, guitarist Yonatan Gat—think Goldstein from Harold and Kumar Go To Whitecastle but paler—is producing a thunderous riff atop drummer Haggai Fershtman’s bass drum. The guitarist and drummer present a moveable feast of fuzzed-out sonic garage-rock over which Shalev wails his nearly incomprehensible lyrics. One song flows seamlessly into another. Shalev, now standing atop the same staircase, demands that everyone follow him. Like some demented rock & roll pied piper, he leads the assembled throng—fans, startled onlookers, record buyers and journalists—straight out the door and onto the street.

Downstairs, Gat has run out of patch-chord and mercilessly continues hammering away on his battered guitar, while Fershtman follows Shalev up and out. Together, the two manage to bring traffic on busy Bloor Street to a halt, as Fershtman stands in the middle of the road slamming away on his snare drum to the beat that, presumably, Gat is still playing downstairs. Shalev is jumping on taxis as they try to pass the massive, Borat-like Fershtman. For a moment, this busy downtown area stands still and watches in awe what seems like the most demented terrorist attack ever (“We’ll attack their sense of culture!”). But it is not a terrorist attack—hell, it can hardly even be described as a concert. It’s anarchy. It’s revolution. It’s the Monotonix.

To understand what Montonix create, you simply have to forget everything you know about the concept of a “rock concert.” There is no stage, there is no crowd: they are one and the same. The band prefers to play on the ground with the people, encouraging the audience to lift them and their instruments into the air as they continue playing—often stealing whatever they can get a hold of. (In the case of the in-store, it happened to be the headband of the man standing beside me, which was then used to blindfold and choke Fershtman.) At every concert, the band has been known to confiscate drinks and pour them onto their hairy naked bodies or drink them out of the used shoe of a startled fan. Sometimes, they go so far as to even light themselves on fire.

Sitting on a park bench in front of Sonic Boom a half hour after the show, the band is not as you’d expect them. Quiet and contemplative, they speak in their native Hebrew for the most part. Gat, the most vocal of the group, explains the band’s evolution: “All of our live performances are spontaneous. We don’t even write out a set list. In Israel, they didn’t like us. They didn’t understand us. We were loud and they just didn’t get it. Cops would break up our shows. We came to New York, kind of like a last-ditch kind of thing, and played one show to pretty much no one. As it turns out, we got invited to play another show because of that gig. Then we got asked to play with the Silver Jews, and we got a booking agent and a lawyer. We’ve been pretty much on the road ever since.”

He’s not kidding. Often travelling for months, the band usually plays about 200 shows a year internationally. “Israel is so far away from everything,” Fershtman explains. “So when we go away, we tend to stay out on the road for long periods of time.”

But, as word of mouth about the group builds to a deafening scream, the concept that makes Monotonix so unique may be threatened when their in-your-face live show is translated to larger audiences where the same kind of intimacy and interaction might not be possible.

“We think about that a lot,” Gat says. “We spend a lot of time with our booker, making sure we don’t get booked into theatres with seats. We played a theatre once and it didn’t turn out well. We make an effort to put on a good original show, and we think that that can translate over to bigger audiences when we get there.”

Contributing to their determination for mainstream acceptance is Shalev’s choice to sing in English rather than in his native Hebrew. “I choose to sing in English because it is a much more expressive language,” the 43-year-old says with a heavy accent, injecting the interview with its first bit of English.
“I write about very basic things in life—daily situations, relationships—and the English language just works to express those things better. With English, you speak from the mouth, and with Hebrew, you speak from the back of your throat.”

To emphasis this, he lets out a “Ha!” and then a Hebrew phlegmy “Cha.” “You see?”

With the release of the Body Language EP earlier this year, the band documented some of the songs behind the show. The six punchy, catchy tunes highlight Shalev’s melodies (often lost in the mayhem of the live show) and bring to light the band’s abilities as songwriters as well as performers. Although they concede that their antics will overshadow their actual tunes for the foreseeable future, Gat and co. have come to peace with that, and have adopted a positive perspective on their situation.

“We’re aware that most of the people who see us now come for the extravaganza of the live show,” Gat admits. “We know we can write good songs and we know we can deliver them well. We can make music which is accessible, but for now what we want is for people to come out and have a good time. That’s the most important thing for us. On record, the songs are good, but we understand that, for now at least, people are coming to see a circus. But this band’s motto is to have fun. We want people to enjoy themselves.”

“Having fun is the most important thing,” Shalev conquers, once again speaking in heavily accented English. “That is all we care about now. And now we must go.”

He says this as a van pulls up to take the band to their next concert, a sold-out show at Sneaky Dees, a 200-person-capacity venue that will see 600 people show up for the band’s 2 am set. It’s their third show in as many days and, if they feel the pressure of success looming over them, they don’t show it. They’ll be back—in this case, three weeks later for another sold-out show at Sneaky Dees. As with every show Monotonix do, it will lead more and more fans to praise their incendiary live antics, and so it will continue for the three Israeli men, until the music isn’t fun anymore. Let’s hope that’s not too soon.