Malka Spigel

Malka Spigel is a founding member of the Israeli rock band Minimal Compact. She has also worked as a solo artist, and as a visual artist, exhibiting in prominent venues such as The Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Festival Hall. She is a member of Githead along with husband Colin Newman, Robin Rimbaud, and fellow Minimal Compact refugee Max Franken. Malka Spigel fell into the music and art world as a Tel-Aviv exile in early 1980s Amsterdam. Minimal Compact, which she co-founded with Berry Sakharof (now Israel's biggest and most respected rock star) and Samy Birnbach (latterly DJ Morpheus), and in which she played bass and contributed occasional vocals, pioneered a minimal post-punk/punk-funk sound that over seven years attracted a large, enthusiastic audience in continental Europe and beyond. During the period 1981 to 1988 the band grew to include drummer Max Franken (now Githead's drummer) and guitarist Rami Fortis (notorious in Israel as its first punk) and were associated with many luminaries, recording with Tuxedomoon's Peter Principle, Wire's Colin Newman, and John Fryer (This Mortal Coil), sound-tracking ballet by choreographer Pierre Droulers, and having a song (sung by Malka) in the Wim Wenders movie Wings of Desire. Malka's working partnership with Colin Newman started in 1986 with "Commercial Suicide" and its follow up "It Seems". The couple married in 1986 and moved to London in 1992, setting up the Swim label, initially to release their own projects (Oracle, Malka's debut Rosh Balata, and Immersion), but later to release the work of other artists. In 1996, Immersion made an installation at The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin[1] , which set Malka on a path of realising herself as a visual artist in addition to being a musician. During the period 2000 to 2002 she gained a degree in fine art, specialising in video and photography. She has since made video work with Immersion (most famously seen at the Royal Festival Hall, London) and video clips for Vapourspace and Minimal Compact. She also has an extensive collection of photography work, primarily created with a lomo LCA camera, which has gained her pre-eminence in the lomo & flickr community. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.