Herzliya from DRUMS UNDEFINED by HIJI

In December 2017, shortly after the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, I traveled there by coincidence. Moving from Tel Aviv toward the Old City, I encountered a landscape where armed young men, sacred sites, and centuries of history coexisted in a charged stillness. Walking through the stone alleys, the weight of layered narratives—faith, conflict, myth, and everyday life—seemed to thicken the air until language fell away.

That night in Herzliya, an affluent coastal district named after Theodor Herzl, news broke of airstrikes in Gaza—only seventy kilometers to the south. Outside my window, people relaxed in gardens, washed cars, and played by the marina, while the same sea became a boundary of danger for those just an hour away. The contrast was overwhelming: leisure and fear, sanctity and violence, folded into a single geography.

Sitting on the beach, I listened to the waves. Their rhythm—dense in frequency, simple in structure—felt like a metaphor for the region itself: opposing phases continually cycling through one another. Sacred and mundane, positive and negative, held in fragile tension.
We, too, exist as phenomena trembling between such poles.

HIJI / Masaya Hijikata (Moussa KalamUllah)

Drummer and artist based in Warsaw.

Drummer of klās’tĭk and sehno. He works across genres while pursuing a personal practice centered on “pre-linguistic rhythm.” Integrating somatic awareness, breath, and Eastern thought, he develops a unique drumming approach that treats rhythm as a living interface between body and world.