Biography
Malka Spigel co-founded the Israeli new wave/art-pop outfit Minimal Compact and served as its bassist. Mapping the arc of her work after that group proves challenging because nearly every subsequent outing on the Swim imprint she runs with spouse Colin Newman appeared under joint credits or under guises such as Immersion, Intens, Earth, Oscillating, and Oracle. Those variously titled partnerships reveal an expansive range, moving with ease between near-beatless abstraction, dance-oriented rhythms, and richly textured, intelligent pop.
Alongside fellow original members Berry Sakharof and Samy Birnbach, Spigel departed Tel Aviv in 1981, first for Amsterdam and then Brussels, in search of surroundings more sympathetic to the band’s aesthetic. Once signed to the Belgian label Crammed, Minimal Compact quickly became one of mainland Europe’s most prominent art-rock forces of the 1980s. Colin Newman of Wire produced the group’s 1986 album Raging Souls; in turn, Spigel appeared on Newman’s Commercial Suicide (1986) and It Seems (1988). After marrying Newman and the eventual dissolution of Minimal Compact, the couple settled in London in the early 1990s and launched their cross-genre label Swim amid the city’s rising electronica scene.
Swim’s inaugural release was Spigel’s own Rosh Ballata (1993). Sung chiefly in Hebrew, the record fused her distinctive vocals and a world-music sensibility with contemporary club rhythms. The next year brought Tree, issued under the Oracle name and drawn from a proto-trip-hop endeavor Spigel had initiated in 1989 together with Newman and Samy Birnbach.
Throughout the mid-1990s, while overseeing Swim’s operations, Spigel joined Newman in a more minimal electronic project they called Immersion; their first album under that banner, Oscillating, arrived in 1994. The pair also revisited material from Tree by remixing tracks under the additional names Earth and Oscillating, and they supplied further reworkings to the Immersion remix collection Full Immersion (1995) credited variously to Immersion and Intens. In autumn 1996, still operating as Immersion, they created a sound installation for the Event Horizon exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
After issuing the 1997 mini-album Hide under her own name and contributing to Newman’s Bastard (1997), Spigel unveiled her second full-length solo statement, My Pet Fish, in 1998. That same year marked her return to live performance; although she had played a one-off promotional show for Rosh Ballata and appeared with Newman at Vienna’s 1995 Phonotaktik festival, she had not toured since the late 1980s. Dates with Newman followed in 1998 and 1999 (the latter billed as Swim). Immersion’s more abstract, ambient album Low Impact surfaced in 1999, and the duo performed again under that name in 2000, increasingly incorporating Spigel’s photographic projections into the presentations.
Her subsequent venture was the pop/rock band Githead, whose lineup comprised Spigel on bass, Newman and Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) on guitars, and Max Franken on drums, with all four members sharing vocal duties. The group issued four recordings: the debut EP Headgit (2004) and the albums Profile (2005), Art Pop (2007), and Landing (2009).
Spigel’s next solo album, Every Day Is Like the First Day, was released in late summer 2012.
Alongside fellow original members Berry Sakharof and Samy Birnbach, Spigel departed Tel Aviv in 1981, first for Amsterdam and then Brussels, in search of surroundings more sympathetic to the band’s aesthetic. Once signed to the Belgian label Crammed, Minimal Compact quickly became one of mainland Europe’s most prominent art-rock forces of the 1980s. Colin Newman of Wire produced the group’s 1986 album Raging Souls; in turn, Spigel appeared on Newman’s Commercial Suicide (1986) and It Seems (1988). After marrying Newman and the eventual dissolution of Minimal Compact, the couple settled in London in the early 1990s and launched their cross-genre label Swim amid the city’s rising electronica scene.
Swim’s inaugural release was Spigel’s own Rosh Ballata (1993). Sung chiefly in Hebrew, the record fused her distinctive vocals and a world-music sensibility with contemporary club rhythms. The next year brought Tree, issued under the Oracle name and drawn from a proto-trip-hop endeavor Spigel had initiated in 1989 together with Newman and Samy Birnbach.
Throughout the mid-1990s, while overseeing Swim’s operations, Spigel joined Newman in a more minimal electronic project they called Immersion; their first album under that banner, Oscillating, arrived in 1994. The pair also revisited material from Tree by remixing tracks under the additional names Earth and Oscillating, and they supplied further reworkings to the Immersion remix collection Full Immersion (1995) credited variously to Immersion and Intens. In autumn 1996, still operating as Immersion, they created a sound installation for the Event Horizon exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
After issuing the 1997 mini-album Hide under her own name and contributing to Newman’s Bastard (1997), Spigel unveiled her second full-length solo statement, My Pet Fish, in 1998. That same year marked her return to live performance; although she had played a one-off promotional show for Rosh Ballata and appeared with Newman at Vienna’s 1995 Phonotaktik festival, she had not toured since the late 1980s. Dates with Newman followed in 1998 and 1999 (the latter billed as Swim). Immersion’s more abstract, ambient album Low Impact surfaced in 1999, and the duo performed again under that name in 2000, increasingly incorporating Spigel’s photographic projections into the presentations.
Her subsequent venture was the pop/rock band Githead, whose lineup comprised Spigel on bass, Newman and Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) on guitars, and Max Franken on drums, with all four members sharing vocal duties. The group issued four recordings: the debut EP Headgit (2004) and the albums Profile (2005), Art Pop (2007), and Landing (2009).
Spigel’s next solo album, Every Day Is Like the First Day, was released in late summer 2012.
Albums
Singles
