Malka Spigel was a founding member and bassist of the Israeli new wave/art-pop group
Minimal Compact. It's difficult to trace her career since
Minimal Compact without references to spouse
Colin Newman, as the releases on the couple's Swim label credited to
Spigel,
Newman, and aliases such as
Immersion, Intens,
Earth, Oscillating, and
Oracle, have all been collaborative projects. These variously named collaborations attest to a considerable versatility as the pair has worked comfortably in a range of styles, from near-beatless abstraction to dance-friendly grooves and lush, intelligent pop.
With original
Minimal Compact bandmates
Berry Sakharof and Samy Birnbach,
Spigel left Tel Aviv in 1981 for Amsterdam and then Brussels, seeking an environment more receptive to the group's sound. Having signed with the Belgian label Crammed,
Minimal Compact soon established itself as one of mainland Europe's most influential art-rock acts of the '80s. In 1986,
Colin Newman of
Wire produced
Minimal Compact's
Raging Souls and, subsequently,
Spigel contributed to
Newman's albums
Commercial Suicide (1986) and It Seems (1988).
Spigel married
Newman, and after the demise of
Minimal Compact, the couple relocated to London in the early '90s. There, amid the burgeoning culture of electronica, they set up their genre-mixing label Swim.
Rosh Ballata (1993),
Spigel's debut under her own name, was Swim's first release. In the hybridizing spirit of the label, this primarily Hebrew-language album blended
Spigel's haunting vocals and a world music sensibility with contemporary dance-floor grooves. The following year saw the appearance of
Tree (under the moniker
Oracle), the fruit of a proto-trip-hop project
Spigel had begun in 1989 with
Newman and Samy Birnbach.
During the mid-'90s, in addition to devoting her efforts to the running of the Swim label,
Spigel embarked on an exploration of more minimal electronica with
Newman. For this project they dubbed themselves
Immersion, releasing
Oscillating (1994). As well as assuming the names
Earth and Oscillating to remix tracks from
Tree, the couple also contributed to an album of
Immersion remixes, Full Immersion (1995), under the aliases
Immersion and Intens. In fall 1996, again as
Immersion, the pair designed a sound installation for the Event Horizon show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Following a mini-album under her own name (1997's
Hide) and work on
Newman's
Bastard (1997),
Spigel's long-awaited second full-length "solo" effort
My Pet Fish appeared in 1998. The same year saw
Spigel's return to live work. Although she had played a promotional concert for
Rosh Ballata and had performed with
Newman at the 1995 Phonotaktik festival in Vienna, she had not toured since the late '80s.
Spigel played a string of dates with
Newman in 1998 and 1999 (with the latter dates as Swim).
Low Impact, a more abstract, ambient
Immersion album, was also released in 1999 and
Spigel and
Newman performed again as
Immersion in 2000. These live shows saw a growing emphasis on the multimedia dimension of the couple's work, increasingly incorporating
Spigel's photographic images.
Her next project was the unlikely pop/ock band
Githead. The lineup featured experimentalists
Spigel on bass,
Newman and Robin Rimbaud (aka
Scanner) on guitars, and Max Franken on drums. All members sang. The group released four recordings: the debut EP
Headgit (2004), and the full-lengths
Profile (2005),
Art Pop (2007), and
Landing (2009).
Spigel's next solo album,
Every Day Is Like the First Day, appeared in the late summer of 2012. ~ Wilson Neate