Aviral approaches electronic music from a different perspective. Rather than beginning with synthesizers, trends, or dancefloor formulas, the Tel Aviv-based producer starts with history.
Photo credit: The lead image for this feature is a digital photo illustration created using generative AI, based on original press photography.
Drawing inspiration from Mesopotamian temple scales, Sufi ceremonial rhythms, West African percussion traditions, and other ancient musical forms, he describes his process as excavation rather than composition.
His latest single, ‘Tamura’, marks the next chapter in that journey. Released via Cymara Music, the track combines tribal percussion, hypnotic melodic elements, and a wordless mantra vocal designed to transcend language and geography. Built for peak-time dancefloors while retaining a ceremonial character, the release reflects the ideas that have become central to Aviral’s artistic identity.
In this conversation, Aviral discusses the origins of his fascination with ancient musical traditions, the philosophy behind his self-described role as a “Sound Archaeologist,” and how ‘Tamura’ fits into a broader exploration of ritual, memory, and human connection.
EG: Hi Aviral, welcome to EG. Great to have you here. How have you been, and where are you speaking to us from today?
Aviral: Thank you for having me. I’m speaking from Tel Aviv – the studio, late afternoon, the city loud just outside. I’ve been good. A quiet kind of good. ‘Tamura’ finished mastering a few weeks ago, so I’m in that strange in-between space artists know: the work is done, but the work isn’t out yet. Mostly I’ve been listening. To the track. To the city. To older recordings I’ve been pulling fragments from for the next things. Tel Aviv in May feels like the right place to release something that draws on the desert and the sea at the same time.
EG: Congratulations on your upcoming single ‘Tamura’ via Cymara Music. What first sparked the idea behind this release?
Aviral: Thank you. ‘Tamura’ started with a single fragment – a chant I couldn’t trace, looped on my phone for almost three months before I touched it in the studio. I kept playing it on long drives, at four in the morning, on plane rides. It wouldn’t leave. At some point, I stopped trying to “make a track” with it and started asking what it wanted to become. The 128 BPM pulse, the D minor weight, the wordless mantra running through the drop – none of those felt like decisions. They were what the fragment kept asking for. Releasing it on Cymara Music feels right because Cymara was built to hold music that arrives this way.
EG: Your approach to music feels deeply tied to excavation and reinterpretation, almost treating sound like archaeology rather than production. Where does that fascination with ancient musical traditions come from?
Aviral: It started with a question I couldn’t put down: how does music actually move people? Not entertain – move. Make them fall in love, march into combat, weep at a wedding, feel God in a room. I kept asking what it was in the rhythm, in the groove, in the timbre of a single voice that could rearrange a human nervous system that fast. The more I dug, the more I found that the answers weren’t in modern production. They were in older music – the music that had survived precisely because it knew how to do this to people. So I started calling myself a Sound Archaeologist. Not as a marketing line, but because it was the most accurate description of what I was doing – digging for the elements that actually move us. Most producers compose. I excavate. The melodies I’m proudest of weren’t written. They were uncovered.
EG: You tend to view your work not as “tracks” or “sets,” but as “discoveries” and “rituals.” At what point did you begin to see electronic music through that lens?
Aviral: The shift happened the first time I played on a system loud enough to make my chest move. There’s a moment in club music – usually around the drop – that has almost nothing to do with electronics. It’s older than that. It’s the same nervous-system response humans have been chasing for thousands of years around fires, in caves, in temples. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t unnotice it. ‘Track’ started to feel like the wrong word for something that, when it lands properly, is closer to a rite. A track is a file. A discovery is something you bring back. A ritual is something a group does together.
“The melodies I’m proudest of weren’t written. They were uncovered”
EG: There’s often a spiritual or ceremonial feeling in music that draws from older cultural textures. When you’re creating, are you consciously trying to transport listeners somewhere?
Aviral: I’m not trying to transport listeners. I’m trying to find the doorway and step back. If I do my job, the doorway is wide enough that the listener walks through it themselves – to wherever they need to go, not to wherever I think they should go. The temptation when you’re making music that touches something ceremonial is to over-direct it, to tell people how to feel. Ancient ritual music never did that. It made space. It held a frame, and the frame was strong enough that whatever rose inside it could rise. That’s what I aim for. A frame, not a destination.
EG: Based in Tel Aviv, you are surrounded by a crossroads of cultures, histories, and sounds. How has that environment shaped your musical identity?
Aviral: Tel Aviv is layered the way old cities are layered, except here it happens within a few city blocks instead of across archaeological strata. North African, Yemeni, Persian, Eastern European, Ethiopian, Russian, Levantine – all of it within walking distance, all of it at full volume. You can’t grow up in that environment and make monochrome music. The city is also full of contradiction: desert and Mediterranean, ancient and brand-new, sacred and absolutely not. ‘Tamura’ doesn’t try to be from one place. It tries to be the conversation between several.
EG: When you discover a sound, rhythm, or melodic fragment that resonates with you, what tells you it belongs in your world rather than simply remaining a reference point?
Aviral: Patience. If a fragment is just interesting, I’ll listen to it a few times and move on. If it belongs to me, I’ll keep returning to it for weeks without intending to – in the car, in a coffee shop, falling asleep – and it’ll show up uninvited. That’s the test. Curiosity is a passing state. Recognition isn’t. When a sound starts feeling less like something I found and more like something I always knew, that’s when I bring it into the studio. By then, the work is mostly done. The fragment has already told me what scale it lives in, what tempo it breathes at. I just have to be quiet enough to hear it.
EG: A lot of modern dance music moves very fast and feels built for immediate impact. Your work seems more focused on atmosphere, tension, and immersion. Do you feel disconnected from parts of today’s electronic landscape?
Aviral: Honestly, yes – but not in a bitter way. There’s room for both. Music built for immediate impact has its place; it gets people into the room. But once the room is full, you need a different language. You need patience, weight, and the willingness to let a track breathe before anything moves. That’s the territory I’m interested in, and I think audiences are too. The growth of the Afterlife and Anyma aesthetic, the rise of ceremonial dancefloors in Tulum, in the desert, on the Mediterranean – that’s not nostalgia. It’s an audience asking for tracks that take them somewhere instead of just shouting at them. So I’m not disconnected. I’m part of a quieter conversation inside the same scene.
“A track is a file. A discovery is something you bring back. A ritual is something a room does together”
EG: Beyond the technical side of production, what emotional or philosophical ideas do you hope people connect with through your music?
Aviral: That the oldest things in us are still the most current. What a Berber chant or a Sufi loop or a devotional drone was reaching for thousands of years ago is the same thing a body on a dancefloor at four in the morning is reaching for now. Different language, same instinct. I’d like a listener – even one who’s never thought about any of this – to leave a set or a release feeling slightly more connected to a longer human story than they were before. Not lectured to. Just connected. Music that reminds you you’re standing in a line that goes back a long way.
EG: Looking ahead, what are you hoping to explore next through the Aviral project?
Aviral: ‘Tamura’ is one piece of a longer dig. I’m working on a sequence of releases through Cymara Music and other more established labels that each excavate from a different tradition – North African rhythm, Levantine vocal, devotional drone, Caucasus polyphony – pulled through a single sonic frame, so they read as chapters of the same book rather than scattered curiosities. Live, I want to bring this into rooms that can hold it: the kind of ceremonial dancefloors where people come to surrender rather than to be entertained. I’d also love to collaborate with traditional musicians directly – not sample them, sit with them. The dig continues.
EG: Thank you so much for your time. We wish you all the best with ‘Tamura’ and everything ahead. Take care!
Aviral: Thank you, EG. Always appreciate the conversation. ‘Tamura’ is out now on Cymara Music – for anyone finding me here for the first time, I hope it’s a doorway. Take care of each other. The dig continues.
Aviral’s ‘Tamura’ is out now via Cymara Music. Stream and download your copy here.
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