Once upon a time, there was a filthy guy on Yitzhak Sadeh Street in Tel Aviv, a small performance club called the Turntable. The tiny club operated on the fringes of Israeli culture, loyal to rock and indie music (no entry for electronic music!) And served as an occasional stage for bands that were not afraid to make noise and audiences who were not afraid to get beaten up in pogo.
Two pairs of friends set up their little kingdom in the same filthy hole. Amir Django Rossiano and Einav Rossiano met Amir Shur and Netali Gvirtz, and out of the friendship the desire to create music came together. Thus was born Fast Music, a small and brave indie label that soon expanded into the Turntable Club as well. The goal, as the name implies, was to create music at the speed of the creative momentum. Dedicate yourself to the idealism and romance of the piece, without a record company and economic considerations on your mind. Friends joined in and the quartet gathered a real community around it, and for a moment it seemed to work, with no money but with a lot of passion and truth.
Legends of this kind often end in a Cinderella story twist. Every rock lover is familiar with the parallel stories about the Volvo Underground and the Sex Pistols, and how it was precisely their failures that managed to change the world and turn them into rock heroes. “Nervous and Fast”, the new documentary created by Amit Itzkar on the story of the label and the aforementioned club, mentions these two legends from the beginning, but the good fairy does not arrive at the end of the film and sprinkles lucky fairy dust on its protagonists. Who was not on the turntable in real time, or was exposed to one of the fast-track artists of the young Channel 24, probably did not know that all this was happening at all.
And yet, “Nervous and Fast” is not a film about failure, even if it has failures of various kinds. In this story doing is a success in itself, even if its fruits enjoy a limited amount of audience. In the end, the label fulfilled its purpose – it released music that really interested those who worked on it and gave a voice even to those for whom no corporation would pour money. The turntable, for its part, lost money on an ongoing basis, but operated for several good and wild years and changed the lives of the people who visited it. The main thing here is the stories, the experiences, the people who were there when it happened. The people the filmmaker described as more important than the Volvo Underground or Sex Pistols, at least for him.
If all this sounds to your liking but you have no previous acquaintance with the operating souls, do not let that stop you. First of all, it’s a “crazy stories that were really” genre, staged with the aim of revealing everything that happened to new eyes and ears – and a lot has happened. Musicians going out to fight Don Quixote at record companies, punk-loving teens breaking everything that happens in their path, a sound man becoming a monster on stage, injuries, identity crises and at least one tragedy.
Beyond that, a variety of local music anchors help tell and interpret the story, including Maor Cohen, Yoav Kutner, Sharon Kantor, Kwame, Elisha Banai and Yuval Mendelssohn. There are a lot of interviewees in this film but the interview atmosphere is completely unhinged, which only reinforces the general vibe that the turntable was a place where anything could happen. There is even a surprising connection to the Israeli mainstream, including a First League artist in an amazing guest appearance and a crazy public singing scene to a song by Shlomo Artzi.
All this hustle and bustle eventually connects to a story that is funny, depressing and sometimes both together. He says quite a bit about art, about the choice of margins from its principle and meanings, about adolescence and a changed cultural reality. You will come out of it laden with inspiration, or quite the opposite. Either way, his heart is in the right place.
“Nervous and Fast: The Story of Fast Music and the Turntable”, now screened at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque