For six years, the Israeli-born guitarist-composer Yonatan Gat toured the world with Monotonix, a garage/noise-rock band known more for their abrasive stage antics (destroying equipment, jumping off balconies) than their music. Gat’s solo project harnesses a similar energy in concert. Working as the leader of a genre-melding rock trio, alongside bassist Sergio Sayeg and human battering ram/drummer Gal Lazer, he improvises manic material in the center of his audience.

“A lot of people look at improvisation as the supreme proof of talent or something—only a really talented musician can improvise—but I’m not sure I agree with that,” says Yonatan Gat. “I think white people are very afraid of improvisation. But it’s not only for the most talented. The first music ever made was a person singing to himself or his family or friends, banging on a piece of wood. That’s improvisation. People are afraid of it. They’re trained against it. It’s like capitalism: Learn what you do best, and that will be your expertise and what you do for the rest of your careers.”

This free-form energy also translates to Gat’s recordings, which are created through a complex process of conceptualization, light rehearsal, improv recording, and exhaustive editing that he compares to the groundbreaking late-’60s work of Miles Davis and Teo Macero on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

Gat employed the Davis-Macero technique extensively on the 2015 album Director, on which the guitarist pared down hours of psychedelic surf-rock grooves, vamps, and riff excursions into a half-hour of music he dubs “alien space music that has nothing to do with reality.” The strange editing style creates a “weird dynamic that really fucks with your head,” with many songs that “start in the middle then cut to the end or beginning.”

But Gat’s creative process mutated with the trio’s latest EP, the mind-melting Physical Copy. He envisioned a specific sound: “Afrobeat guitars, sliding bass that sounds like a synth-bass, and drums influenced by electronic music.” The band brought this conceptual playbook into Chicago’s Electrical Audio studio, working with famed recording engineer Steve Albini for a lightning-rod three-hour session—one so physically intense that the band was only able to play in two-minute spurts.

“A lot of our records are very dynamic,” Gat says. “We play very soft and then very hard. But this one is not. We stay in the higher register of dynamics most of the time. The drum parts are so busy, so virtuosic that Gal couldn’t play more than 90 to 120 seconds. We just knew going into the studio that we had to play those two minutes of improvisation and figure it out afterwards.”

The two pieces, “0” and “1,” thrive on this mayhem, with the trio pummeling their instruments into submission. “The songs could not have been played straight by us, but when we edited it, we put it together like a mixtape,” Gat says. “You actually get to hear six minutes straight, turning us into some kind of superhuman band.”

It was a bold move bringing this instinctual approach into top studio with an iconic engineer—a so-so session could have proved a costly waste of time. But Gat never doubted his methods.

“I go into the studio, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘If it’s an EP, that’s fine; if it’s an LP, that’s fine. If we only come up with one good song, then that’s great, too,’” Gat says. “The idea is to not get married to an idea of exactly what you come up with, to really go into the moment. I don’t think about the studio costs.”

Improvisation isn’t common in popular rock music. And, as Gat points out, there’s a difference between jamming and true improv. But his unconventional craft shows that it’s possible for rock artists to celebrate the magic of chaos.

“People think we improvise because it’s fun,” Gat says. “And it is really fun. It’s really hard for me to go on tour and play the same songs over and over every night. I did that for years with Monotonix, and I just don’t want to do that right now. But the main reason we improvise is because I think it’s another great way to write songs. Improvisation always exists. It’s letting chaos in. And when you let chaos in, anything can happen.”

Yonatan Gat plays with A Certain Zone and Hellaphant at Pilot Light on Sunday, March 13, at 9 p.m. Admission is $8. 18 and up. 

Ryan Reed

Ryan Reed is a freelance music/culture writer-editor. In addition to Knoxville Mercury, he contributes to publications like Rolling Stone, Billboard Magazine, Paste, Relix Magazine, Stereogum, Ultimate Classic Rock, Esquire, and Rhapsody. On the increasingly rare occasion he isn't slumped behind a laptop, he's probably teaching adjunct college classes, record shopping, or unsuccessfully attempting to master "The Purdie Shuffle."