A month after Hamas' deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the group of electronic music stars is promoting a new 73-song project to raise money for victims of the Supernova festival massacre.
The Bring Them Back compilation covers the gamut of electronics from trance to techno and features a number of prominent Israeli names including Infected Mushroom, Astrix, Red Axes and Astral Projection. At least 260 people were killed and dozens more kidnapped when Hamas militants attacked Israel's Nova tribe's Supernova psytrance festival in Israel's Negev Desert, about five kilometers from the Gaza border.
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“The Nova Tribe team that organized the event that was attacked by Hamas are good friends of mine,” Astrix, whose real name is Avi Shmailov, told Rolling Stone . “The psychotrance tribe is united, we all know each other. The hundreds of innocent dancers who were killed, seriously injured and kidnapped are like my family. Thousands of others who somehow managed to survive also suffered greatly. We want to help them as much as we can.”
Shmailov contributed the song “Shamanic Tales” to the project, which opens his latest album, available now on Bandcamp. He was on tour in Brazil when heavily armed Hamas fighters stormed the festival. He later learned that Avi Sassi, the uncle of Moonclipse Techno project partner Omri Sassi, had reportedly died because he jumped on a grenade that was thrown into a shelter where festival-goers were hiding. “They could identify his body only by his jewelry,” Shmailov said, describing Avi as “the person you fall in love with when you first meet her.”
The musician admitted that he also knew several Hamas hostages. Asked for his opinion on the broader conflict currently gripping the region, which includes unprecedented retaliatory air strikes and an Israeli ground offensive that has reportedly killed 10,000 Gazans, Shmailov said he had no answer and only Hope for peace.
“I am a simple man, an artist, a musician. "I don't consider myself someone who has the knowledge to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just because millions of people listen to my music," he told Rolling Stone . “I think that innocent people on both sides are victims of Hamas. I hope we can find a way to live in peace when they are gone. I have fans from many Arab countries and have been in regular contact with them over the years. We met at a festival. I know, and they know, that we can all live together in this world.
According to the Electronic Music Community, the organization behind the project, the money raised by the "Bring Them Back" compilation will be donated to the survivors of the festival massacre and the relatives of those killed, kidnapped or disappeared. Some of the funds will be used to support psychological care and to build treatment centers with housing, the group said.
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