A party? Instead of dancing, lying on a mattress. Meet "Cloud Space"
At Cloud Space in Tel Aviv, musicians and DJs like Omri Smadar, Darwish, Atar Mayner, and Asaf Amdursky move from the stage to meditative sessions in front of an audience lying down with their eyes closed. The Soul Therapy team explains how the war and the stress of recent years gave birth to the format, and why for them, music can also become a space for pausing, relaxing, and coping.
In Kiryat HaMelacha in Tel Aviv, an area more identified with clubs, bars, and parties than with silence, a space has opened in recent months that offers an almost opposite experience. The audience does come to meet well-known musicians and DJs, but instead of standing in front of them and dancing, they lie down on mattresses, cover their eyes, and listen for about an hour to a meditative set built especially for them. There is no dance floor here, no drops waiting for applause, and not even eye contact between the artist and the people in front of them.
Behind Cloud Space are the people from Soul Therapy — Yaron Amor and Guy Dreyfuss, together with Tal Oshpiz, a partner and manager of the place — who are trying to take the music they know well from the nightlife world to a completely different place. Soul Therapy started even before Cloud Space had a permanent address. Amor, a veteran creator and DJ, says that the connection was born after he himself entered the worlds of Buddhism and meditation.
"At some point, parts connected," he says. "I realized that my friends, colleagues who deal with music, do a kind of meditation that they don't define as meditation, but they have the ability to move people with the help of music and change states of consciousness." At first, he says, these were small and experimental meetings in a studio in Tel Aviv. "I invited friends, all kinds of people. It was very experimental, small groups, and there were amazing reactions, especially when you do it in an orderly way, with a built concept, with explanations and everything."
The idea itself was in his head even before, but the war turned it from something theoretical into a project. "The war was a trigger," says Amor. "I saw that everyone around me was either going to reserve duty or helping in some way. The idea had been in my head for a long time, but I didn't have the courage to carry it out, because it's quite scary to deal with the practice of thousands of years and say, 'Here, I'm doing something new.' When the war started, I said, 'Okay, I have to do something.' If I can help people, then that's where it started."
