Photo: Daniel Shiff

London-based, Tel Aviv-raised keyboardist and producer Yoni Mayraz has announced the release of his debut album, Dybbuk Tse!. The title is culled from Jewish folklore, referring to a practice to remove malevolent wandering spirits (the Dybbuk) from the body of a person. “I wanted to write something with a dark atmosphere,” Mayraz explained, “this album represents both my cultural background and musical influences, it’s a constant dialogue between the old and the new, ancient and modern. It represents me and where I am right now”.

Dybbuk Tse! was mixed and mastered by beat maker Eric Lau (Mansur Brown), and hip hop engineer Chris Athens (Robert Glasper, Erykah Badu), and it fuses influences aplenty, including punk, garage, hip hop, club music and Middle Eastern music. As the press release describes, it “successfully broadens jazz’s sonic palette while respecting its traditions”.

We’ll have to wait until June 2nd for the album to arrive through Astigmatic Records but we can already hear the lead single ‘The Master Wore a White Robe’. Speaking about it, Mayraz explained “it’s a flashback to a blurry chain of events that occurred to the writer and his Master, suggestively a female, in some sort of spiritual practice.” Here it is.