Israeli alternative art-rock sextet Eatliz prepare to make their Shanghai debut this week as part of JUE Festival, with a show at Yuyintang on Friday 23 March. Ahead of the gig, Time Out talk to the band about Tel Aviv’s music scene, working with Beijing artist Yan Wei and having their music video hand-picked by Spike Lee.

On their musical style Eatliz is like a playground of musical genres with rock being the dominant player. It’s quirky and unexpected music that takes from every genre we feel like blending in - prog, metal, surf, bossa, goth, indie, Middle Eastern music and a bit of funk here and there.
 
On Israel’s music scene It is very vibrant and has a strong urge to burst out. Most of the exciting stuff takes place in Tel Aviv, where you can catch great parties and cool live acts every night in every genre; from underground experimental hardcore punk to free acoustic gigs of singer-songwriters. New venues and bands constantly pop up and there is a constant creativity vibe in the air.

On making their animated music video ‘Hey’ Our guitarist Guy Ben Shetrit is also a 3D animator, and he always wanted to integrate his two great passions - music and animation. He started working on it with some animator friends in a local studio in Israel and eventually a crew of 15 animators joined the crazy non-commercial 3D project, where you can really go wild and don't have any boring boss over your head. But it took three years to be realised. Normally this is the time it takes to do a feature film, but this is what we needed for three and a half minutes.

On winning the Spike Lee Animation Award Eventually we treated this music video as a feature, built a website for it and sent it to film festivals, including the Bablegum Online film competition at Tribeca Film Festival in New York, where director Spike Lee picked this video personally to be the winner.
 
Now imagine you're in your living room, getting a phone call from New York, announcing Spike Lee chose your music video as the winner, and that the ceremony is in 72 hours in New York. We’ve already got your tickets booked, just hop on the plane and come get it!

On working with Beijing-based illustrator Yan Wei Yan Wei's works caught our eyes while visiting neocha.com, a great website, it's very inspirational. Her distinctive art really stood out, and while seeing it we thought it would be cool to feature it on our tour flyers. We contacted her and she was very happy to do this collaboration. Her works fit our bitter-sweet-surreal art concept and we were honoured to get her approval. We’re looking forward to meeting her face to face at our Beijing show.

On what to expect from their Shanghai show We will be premiering our new show which adds another dimension to our music. Without spoiler-ing it, expect some visual stimulations and also a peek at our next album which is due to be released by the end of 2012.