Yossi The Prophet Ran on ‘Music 24’ (Israeli MTV) translated from Hebrew December 27, 2006
Before we start, here is a little introduction. This is not a regular critique of the show. This next article will try to explain in words a new world that is being created by a craftsman virtuoso. It looks like him and his music came to us from another planet on an unusual tour.
If this is the music that is going to be done in the future, then we have a good future: at least musically.
Yossi Fine does to bass what Hendrix did for electric guitar. In an extravagant show, he stands at the front of the stage with a lot of effects and a spacious sound system that makes you drool and gives you over two hours of something that probably never happened before.
The explosive talent, musical understanding and perfect control over the instrument, are all some sort of hypnosis. Lots of people in the audience were standing with their jaws dropped, with no movement, and sometimes looking over their shoulder to the person next to him, trying to ask for an explanation to what’s happening on stage.
My God, what is he is doing?
Or moreover, how does he do it?
In all honesty, you don’t need to ask questions to understand the maestro. It is better to just get hooked and feel the bass frequencies boiling deep in your stomach and the fire in the big soul of this Rastaman. Just enjoy the sounds that make you jump – or just look at him while he is playing.
So what do we have here? A show that sits all around Fine’s bass that constantly improvises nonstop and gets impossible sounds. It’s very simple actually. Yossi Fine stands on stage with a bass guitar, the uniqueness comes from the soul he puts into the show, because he succeeds in getting a sound second to none.
Fine starts every tune with a musical loop that starts from his computer, continues to play a certain bass line, loops it with one of his pedals and what we get is a one-man jam session. That creates stuff for the first time and creates layers upon layers of sounds and gets into a full musical compositions.
The structure of the show is super-modern, futuristic even, but it also takes you back to the warm sounds of ‘back in the day.’ Fine takes all his influences that he ever heard as a musician, and as a constant searcher, pours them out on stage. He puts life into the computer and the drum machine and makes it human. You can tell he got really deep into whatever he does and what he can get out of it. He feels the crowd and their reaction for what they both are experiencing. By that, he continues to send signals, and signs.
There are very few musicians that can go into the category of ‘super’, but Fine is one of those no doubt. After the show, I heard two people raving about the show, one recalled “after what I saw here tonight, I will wake up a different person tomorrow.”
Enough said.
The Fine Show of the Rasta Master on Bass NRG Mahariv (Israeli New York Times) April 12, 2007
Throughout the show that built gradually and slow until a musical explosion, Fine made sure to incorporate African music with an electronic sound, just like he does with Ex-Centric Sound System. With the help of technology: pedals, sampler, laptop, Fine’s bass guitar shoots lots of different sounds that always keep you on your toes.
Sometimes it’s so heavy that it shakes your body from the inside. Sometimes it’s very light-hearted and melodic until you get confused and start to think that he’s playing electric guitar. Sometimes he puts on a Jamaican a cappella and the whole place starts to smell like the sweet leaf.
So let’s get straight to the point: slowly a sweet illusion of a whole band is standing on stage but it’s only one person. One highlight of the show were where he hosted local MC’s and DJ’s to collaborate.
Sometimes it gets complicated but in the end, the audience becomes very satisfied wanting more.
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