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ginning was we were exploring
the destruction of culture in the
20th Century — not just Jewish
culture, but all sorts of culture."
Wolfson, 35, acknowledges that
▪ Kaddish "came from our attempt
to sum up our whole experience
as Jews living in England," but
he concurs with Saunders about
the piece's broad view.
"It's about Europe in the last
100 years," he says. "That includes
the Holocaust, but it takes in a lot
of other things as well. For me,
it should not be approached with
any kind of trepidation: 'Oh my
God, this album is so heavy, it's
going to destroy me' or whatever.
"To me, it's very therapeutic
and cathartic. It takes you
through an emotional, disturbing
journey, but I think you come to
rest with some sort of forgiveness,
if you like, at the end of the jour-
ney. There is some kind of posi-
tive outlook. It's a long, dark
tunnel, but there's a light there
at the end."
Saunders grew up in a Reform
synagogue, while Wolfson de-
scribes his upbringing as "a bit
more Orthodox." Both were bar
mitzvahed, and while neither con-
siders himself particularly devout
these days, they share a strong
Jewish identity that they say was
forged when they were young.
"I think Jews tend to feel a bit
like outsiders in England," Wolf-
son says. "We're not part of the
tea on the lawn with the vicar set,
which everyone around us took
for granted. All our non-Jewish
friends were part of that. I don't
think we experienced particular
anti-Semitism, but you just feel
a bit different."
They also began looking for
something different in their mu-
sic, something beyond what Wolf-
son describes as "going to see a
band and focusing on the sexy
lead singer for an hour and a half.
That's great for the first 10 min-
utes."
So during the mid-'80s, Saun-
ders and Wolfson mined their in-
fluences — which range from
Stravinsky to Pink Floyd, techno
dance music, the jazzy art rock of
Soft Machine and the aggressive
industrial tones of Throbbing
Gristle — and came up with
lengthy, ambient compositions
that they dressed up onstage with
images from 30 projectors. It was
film music, but with films they
created by weaving together ta-
pestries of images.
They called the whole thing
Towering Inferno and performed
everywhere from inactive volca-
noes in Sicily to dance clubs in
Britain. At the same time, they
began piecing together the ideas
for what would eventually be-
come Kaddish — a process that
\,=-) would take eight years before it
debuted in 1995.

"It became real when we real-
ized what kind of music we were
doing," Saunders says. "A lot of it
was influenced by the music we
heard as children in synagogue.
We made a conscious decision to
use Jewish sounds with the mu-
sic we were doing and combine
them with more modern things
— industrial, heavy metal —
which we felt hadn't been done
before.
"We wanted to put them right
up there into popular music, if
you like, rather than some
guarded, traditional secret. We
wanted to make available these
sounds that some people had
never heard before — the sounds
of shofar, a rabbi chanting, can-
tors, the Kaddish itself."
The duo acknowledges that
the making of Kaddish wasn't
always smooth. There were ar-
guments and false starts, mo-
ments of despair but also
moments of epiphany when the
right pieces came together.
"It had to be kind of decon-
structed and fragmented and put
back together again several
times," Saunders explains. "We
wanted to produce a finished
whole that was very solid, almost
like a roller coaster where you
have to get to the end before you
get off. You can't get off in the
middle."
At the same time, Saunders
says, he and Wolfson "never,
ever thought of performing it
live," and it took them another
year to construct that presenta-
tion and to recruit a band that
includes former members of Soft
Machine and Hungarian vocal-
ists Marta Sebestyen and Endre
Szkarosi.
Towering Inferno plans to
stage Kaddish concerts in North
America this fall, but Saunders
and Wolfson aren't expecting the
same degree of controversy they
encountered in Europe.
"Every response to this album
is extreme," Saunders says. "Peo-
ple either passionately love it, or
they don't get it at all. We've had
a few Jews absolutely furious
about the mix of sacred and mod-
ern — 'How dare you combine
sacred Jewish prayers with Hun-
garian folk songs and heavy-met-
al guitars?' — but they've tended
to be the minority. We've also
had the Chief Rabbi in Bu-
dapest, who thinks it's wonder-
ful, and the wife of a man who
runs the Jewish museum in Vi-
enna, who came to the concert
both nights there and was total-
ly bowled over by it.
"It's actually a good thing,
though. It's much better that
people react strongly than to get
no reaction, really. We did set
out to provoke a response, you
know."

❑

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