“It was still dark when I put the first vinyl on the set,” Israeli DJ Artifex recalled in an interview with DW in Berlin. It was 5.35 am. The perfect time for the Israeli DJ named Yarin Ilovich. A little later the first rays of the sun appeared over the desert. Minute by minute the sky was getting brighter and brighter.

Yarin Ilovich is a survivor of the terrorist attack by Hamas militants at the Supernova music festival in Israel on October 7. He is the last DJ to play music. He made people dance welcoming the sunrise.

More than 3,000 visitors rocked to psychedelic beats in the middle of the desert. The Israeli DJ didn’t hear the first rockets fired from Gaza that hit Israel minutes before 6:30. Nor did he react when bystanders saw paratroopers heading their way. And then one of the organizers came on stage and said: “Turn off the music! We are on red alert!” The music stopped abruptly. The scene was captured in a video that made the rounds on the internet.

One year ago on October 7, Islamists from the Gaza Strip invaded Israel killing more than 360 Nova Festival attendees. 44 people were taken hostage in Gaza, while several were injured. In total, around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel and 251 were held hostage in Gaza. Shortly after the attack on the Festival, Israel’s war against the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas began.

“We will dance again”

Jarin Ilovic managed to reach Kibbutz Reim with some friends, where a handful of policemen were trying to resist the attack of the Palestinian Islamists. “It looked like a biblical disaster,” the Israeli DJ recalled to DW. “Everywhere on our way there were burnt vehicles and scattered corpses. All around us are dead people and desert.”

In the first months after the attack, DJ Artifex went to a psychotherapist every week to help him deal with the psychological trauma left behind by the shocking experiences. But the best therapy for him was music. As he says, music is his “safe harbor”. Where he feels safe and happy.

“We will dance again”, is the motto of the survivors of the massacre. They thus send the message that they are not defeated, that they do not allow anyone to deprive them of their belief in a magical, different world. Unfortunately, not all survivors manage to manage the tragedy they experienced in such a positive way.

He plays the same set for the survivors

DJ Artifex has played several times in the last few weeks for the so-called “Nova Tribe”. This is what the friends of the Supernova parties have been calling themselves for years. Today the “Tribe” is a group of survivors who meet regularly after October 7th to grieve, talk and heal body and spirit together through yoga, meditation and music.

DJ Artifex doesn’t just play psytrance music for Nova fans. Over and over, he plays the exact same set he interrupted at 6.29am. on October 7. “For many people it is important to hear me complete the program without interrupting in the middle. They tell me that if they can hear me without the noise of the rockets, they are able to close the chapter that was lost in their souls. So the music ends the way it should have ended, in a different reality.

Editor: Stefanos Georgakopoulos