Israeli, Tel Aviv-based sound and trans-media artist, an independent filmmaker and producer Ran Slavin began his artistic career as an experimental guitarist but, now, with his thirteenth solo album, A Night On Earth, he decided to make an ambient jazz album. Salvin wrote the music, produced the album and released it with his independent label, Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings.

Slavin plays on the album samples of his electric guitar playing and is accompanied mainly by local trumpeter Idit Mintzer. A Night On Earth suggests a deep cinematic ambiance into rainy atmospheres of moody noir lounge, but it echoes Slavin’s previous multidisciplinary works which addressed themes of materiality and immateriality, saturation, the visible and invisible, geo-political fictions through mythical and historical dualities.

The thirteen pieces portray distant, imaginary places and are structured of layers of suggestive and surrealist, and sometimes even chaotic, dream-like soundscapes (one of Slavin’s acclaimed films is Call for Dreams, 2020, set against the backdrop of a Noir-esque Tokyo, and deals with themes of identity, consciousness, and the choices of what reality to believe). A few pieces of A Night On Earth like «Casual Entropy», «Fjord Dive» and «Mnemonic Luxury» references the work of Austrian guitarist and sound artist Christian Fennesz. The acoustic, ethereal trumpet playing of Mintzer is arranged as contrasting the enigmatic samples of Slavin’s electric guitar with softer, emotional tones or offering haunting sounds to Slavin’s urban cinematic dreamscapes.

A Night On Earth cements the idiosyncratic and rich sonic imagination of Slavin.

Eyal Hareuveni

Ran Slavin (el.g, samples), Idit Mintzer (tp), Yaaki Levy (perc),  Shai Yuval (p)