Originally from Lodz, but raised in Tel Aviv, Malka Spigel began her musical and artistic life in Amsterdam in the early 1980s. There, she first picked up a bass guitar and, with fellow émigrés Berry Sakharof and Samy Birnbach, founded Minimal Compact, whose middle-eastern nuanced post-punk would garner a large, loyal following, especially in continental Europe. The band (later joined by Rami Fortis and Max Franken) put out six studio albums between 1981 and 1988, and their song When I Go sung by Spigel was famously featured on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders s 1987 film, Wings Of Desire . Although Minimal Compact haven t released any new material for over two decades, their stature has continued to grow with each reawakening of the band for live work: six dates in Israel in 2012, for instance, saw them play to crowds unimaginable even in their heyday. Marrying Wire s Colin Newman in 1986, they quickly developed a creative partnership and set up the Swim label in the early 1990s. Spigel s debut solo album Rosh Ballata , mini-album Hide , second full-length My Pet Fish , and projects recorded under the names Oracle and Immersion all emerged between 1993 and 1997. In 2004, with Newman and Robin Rimbaud, she formed the band Githead, which has to date released three acclaimed albums. Every Day Is Like The First Day may be Malka Spigel s third solo album, but it opens a whole new vista for her work, and has all the freshness and promise of an exciting debut. The genesis of this material was an exploratory four-day stint with Newman with zero preparation at a studio run by Stereolab s Andy Ramsay, which offered a treasure trove of musical playthings with which to interact intuitively from bouzouki and vibraphone to decommissioned Stereolab organs and synths. Having laid the foundations, the couple embarked on a second phase, opening the work up to collaboration, with guest musicians chosen from friends with whom she hadn t worked before, so as to remove any sense of continuity, familiarity or habit.That list of collaborators would eventually include Alexander Balanescu, Andy Ramsay, Johnny Marr, Julie Campbell (LoneLady Psychic Life), Matthew Simms (It Hugs Back, Wire), Nik Colk Void (Factory Floor, KaitO, Carter Tutti Void), Ronald Lippok (To Rococo Rot, Tarwater), and acclaimed soundtrack composer Teho Teardo. What comes across from this elaborate process (involving a grand total of thirteen musicians, four countries and eight studios) is the essence of each song as what Spigel would call the first song a distinct, singular entity, with its own unique emotional resonance and atmosphere. Blending real and synthetic instruments in ways that are at once seamless and striking, these songs are as rich as they are diverse. A meditation on ephemerality in 3/4, Ammonite sets the agenda, its Mellotron flute, live strings and bouzouki shaping otherworldly textures. Newman s production here and throughout the record is crucial, allowing the individual parts to breathe and retain their own identity, while weaving them into a lush, integrated whole. There s often a subtly hypnotic quality to this work, most memorably on tracks that forego drums, building cyclical patterns from more understated percussive and melodic elements such as vibraphone, xylophone, violin, cello and Mellotron: the ethereal Dream Time and After The Rain , the haunted Back In The Old City and the bittersweet Lost In Sound . Other tracks have a greater immediacy and a sometimes harsher edge. This is, above all, an album about creativity and the creative process an artistic statement bringing together her work in different media, and music made with a visual artist s sense of colour, atmosphere and composition. First 1000 copies presented in limited edition