Our series of monthly features focuses on different controllerists from around the world that are either pushing the envelope of electronic music and live performance in some way or another, or accomplished performers with an unmistakable sound. (Yes, I know we skipped January and February. The series is still on, though.)

Photo courtesy of Yeuda Ben-Atar

This month we’ll focus on Yeuda Ben-Atar a.k.a. Side Brain, an L.A.-based controllerist and producer that uses game controllers to play his beats, which are infused with 8-bit type sounds.

Yeuda’s been featured by Dubspot and is one of the most prominent controllerists in the Los Angeles area, a city he moved to from Israel.

“The move was entirely about my girlfriend at the time. We were leaving happily in Tel-Aviv where I studied music while she worked in a Social Marketing company.” Yeuda told me. “After she lost her job in the Israeli Company, she started to get a lot of offers from U.S companies. One offer from LA was almost impossible to refuse so she asked me if I want to move and I said yes. I couldn’t believe how my life took me to this perfectly natural place. I thought to myself “everything is falling into place”. Actually, my first album “On the Second Moon of Earth” was about the move from one side of the world to the other. In reality it reflected on two things: making music on my laptop with headphones cause I still don’t have a decent studio to work in and secondly starting to know the completely different culture I found myself living in. (By the way my girlfriend at the time is now my wife and we just had our first child in January).”

He’s come a long way from the days of playing guitar and singing as Juda Baduda in in Tel Aviv parks. He now mods old school game controllers to play music, and his 8 bit beats leave audiences screaming for more with every live show that he does. This has helped him to see the music world he dwells in as a playground to be explored. Like seeing a kid in a candy store, Yeuda’s enthusiasm and fascination with what he does is contagious:

“Today we can already see controllers with game-like controls such as the Midi Fighter. We can also see a lot of people using Kinect (or other camera based motion detector interfaces) to play their music with their body. And we can see most DAWs aiming to a more immersive music making experience where everything happens much faster and more like a computer game. What I’m trying to say is… We as live electronic musicians need to build our controlleristic playground to play with on stage.”

Ideed we do.