Yotopia are Tomer Dayan & Yonatan (Yoni) Rimon.
Tomer was born in Jaffa in 1978. He graduated in Sound Engineering studies at the "Sound - Yoav Gera Academy" in Tel Aviv. He got into creating electronic music after years of jlistening, and sitting next to people writing (mostly Yoni), till one day he thought to him self "why not me?", since that moment he hasn’t stopped creating music. Early influences include groups like The Prodigy, Depeche Mode, The Chemical Brothers and Kraftwerk. Classical influences include David Bowie and Pink Floyd, pearl Jam, Faith No More and many more.He started writing music in 1999 on Fast Tracker. He has been DJing in underground parties 1999. Tomer also writes music on his own under the name ATom and works together with DJ GuyShati (Evil Drug Lords), under the name Remedy.
Yonantan, born in the same year and place as Tomer, has a BSc from the department of Mathematics And Computer Science in Ben-Gurion University Of The Negev in Beer Sheva. As a keen lover of electronic music and computers he was dragged into combining both of them and as a result he started writing music since the age of 16, using his old Atari ST computer, mainly messing about with no real aspirations. Early influences include groups like The Prodigy, SL2, Altern8, hardcore groups like Charley LowNoise & Mental Theo, and a lot of breakbeat, jungle and drum & base. He is working solo under the name Positive.
The guys met in high school and became best friends. During school they listened to a lot of music together. Then they’ve been at the same unit in the army and went to a lot of parties together. It was only natural that they will start making music together, and indeed they started to create psychedelic music in 1998, mainly for the fun of it (under the name Volcano) and since then spent every spare moment writing music. they work in harmony, knowing each other’s weaknesses and advantages and say they have a lot of fun doing it. When Yoni had to go to university in Beer Sheva, which is pretty far from Tel Aviv they stopped working together for a while, but that didn't last long.
In year 2000, after a period of silence from Yonatan, Tomer dragged him to electronic music creation again, and since then, they're producing music and playing at parties together under the name Yotopia.
They state this following elements as crucial for them in music making: always innovate, work with the feel, make a story in a track and try to transfer the certain mood you are in into the track itself- after all music is about mood.
In 2003, Yotopia have signed a record deal with ZMA records from Greece and are currently working on a debut album, which is destined for release later this year. They are also compiling a new compilation for the ZMA Sessions series.
So far they have released: Yotopia- Go! (Encoder), Yotopia- Pro Aggressive (Shoot It Out), Yotopia & Nasser- Warm Up (Arise), Yotopia- Spark (Battle Royal).
On their side project they've released: Atom- Koo Koo (Digital Drops), Positive- It's Alive (Fata Morgana). |
