“My principle is that though I may always be afraid to enter new areas, I will always enter them,” says Eduard Shyfrin. This statement encapsulates the essence of the singular talent behind the musical project Shyfrin Alliance.
After years as a successful businessman, mathematician, physicist, and bestselling author, Shyfrin, who divides his time between London and the south of France, decided to revisit his lifelong passion for music, which he had studied during his childhood. Embarking on his musical journey when lockdown hit, with vocal and guitar lessons, he wrote his first-ever compositions, and introduced his debut album, “Upside Down Blues.” It was, as the artist puts it, a bold enterprise to undertake in his sixties.
Shyfrin Alliance has been an impressive success. Its 12 tracks of intoxicating rock, blues, and romantic balladry, brimming with the messages of unconditional love and antiwar, captured the attention of tastemakers around the world. Making the playlists on radio stations across the US, UK, France, and Germany, it racked up almost half a million streams on Spotify.
It was also a continuation of Shyfrin’s quest to push the boundaries of scientific and philosophical concepts. After all, his book “From Infinity to Man: The Fundamental Ideas of Kabbalah Within the Framework of Information Theory and Quantum Physics” was a groundbreaking Amazon bestseller that showed how the concepts of Jewish mysticism resonate with 21st-century science.
His new album is just as bold
Shyfrin’s album, “In the Shadow of Time,” is another fearless step onto a little-trodden path: the complex topic of time. “I don’t think an album exists that is dedicated purely to the topic of time,” he says, shaking his head. “You will not find another album like this.” Each of the seven songs of his second album - recorded, like his debut, with top rock musicians from France in the Paris studios Barillet, Ferber, and Grand Armee - is dedicated to different aspects of time and how we tackle it. The theme is tied to his extensive studies of the deep world of Kabbalah and science, which followed a crisis experienced by the artist in 2002, when a combination of adverse events led him to suffer something of a breakdown. It prompted a life-changing revelation.
“I got through and continued working, but I realized that something inside me had radically changed. I started asking myself questions I’d never asked before: Why are we here? Why must we die? What’s after death? I realized that unless I found answers, I wouldn’t be able to live a normal life.”
A radically changed mindset was born as the award-winning scientist embarked on a steadfast pursuit of meaning and purpose, research and writing bestselling books. It all culminated in his songs - a continuation of his Kabbalah and science research.
“Most importantly, it changed my attitude to the world, my understanding of the meaning of life, of our mission,” he says. “My music is strongly affected by my research because this research changed my view of the world. I started asking different questions, and that is why I was interested in finding new approaches to the basic notions - God, man, life, death, time, love - and expressing them in musical form. That’s a very challenging task.”
“In the Shadow of Time” was more challenging to create than his debut album. Even though he was no longer new to the machinations of making an album, and his composing and vocal skills were strengthened by experience and the further lessons he took to hone the distinctive, authoritative bass voice that characterizes his songs, the unique subject was intense, probing, and intangible.
“Because time is the most mysterious entity,” he explains. “It’s hard to cope with time because we don’t understand what it is and why it should be the end point of certain stages. Nobody knows the nature of time. There is no definition.” Not that Shyfrin would relish taking on a topic that was anything other than challenging.
“You are absolutely right,” he says with a chuckle. “Put it this way, all my research on Kabbalah and science is challenging. There is no other author on this topic. We cannot provide the final answers - that’s not realistic on such a difficult and unique topic. But we shouldn’t stop searching.”
His quest for meaningful lyrics is summed up by the story he tells of how he came to write his single, “Buddha Blues,” an enthralling and uplifting earworm blues-rock melody with irresistible guitar licks, piano, Hammond organ, and a gospel-blues chorus. Its message? A Buddhism-inspired one of time as a healer. It came about one summer, when hearing a pop song on every street corner sparked a debate with his wife about what he considers shallow music.
Eduard says, “I told my wife that this pop song would not stand the test of time. I’m not interested in shallow lyrics. For me, the message - the lyrics - are very important.”
In response, he challenged himself to write a meaningful blues song in two minutes, and ‘Buddha Blues’ emerged. Family members loved its philosophical message.
“It is saying that we can approach anything in our life differently,” says Eduard. “It’s Buddha’s approach. People misunderstand Buddhism – that you should get rid of your desires because your desires are the source of your problems. But this is simplistic. Actually, what Buddha said is that you should get rid of your wrong desires.”
Having spanned the genres with his debut, In the Shadow of Time is an album of blues-rock alone. It’s the genre in which he started composing after listening intensively to blues music (“I don’t think there are any blues songs on Spotify which I didn’t listen to,” he said of his preparation for his first LP).
The other challenge, in addition to the tricky subject of “time,” was that the music itself should reflect the topic. Hardest to write was “Insanity Blues.” Setting out to convey the feeling of a person being tortured by time to a degree of insanity, he gave the track a snaking blues-guitar riff and dramatically built the frenzied instrumentation and intense vocals to capture the mental turmoil.
“My goal was to express the inner suffering and tension which I experience when I think about time,” he reflects. “You cannot convey this unless you feel it yourself; it’s very deep and personal. When you start thinking about what time is, and you realize you cannot escape it, that is difficult. We cannot run away from time.”
The title track imagines an ominous figure controlling us mortals, staying in the shadow of time, comparing its unrecognizably mysterious forms to an abstract expressionist painting such as by the artist Jackson Pollock because “we don’t know who is there. It’s a great mystery. Who is this pushing us to do something when we are in the shadow of time? He’s shapeless.”
A dramatic soundscape of rolling drums and a threatening bass-baritone portrays the feeling of torment as Shyfrin grapples with time’s unfathomable nature: “He is shapeless, no circle, no triangle, no square, he is faceless. He is always with me, everywhere and nowhere.”
The stand-out track “Color of Time” directly speaks to his studies of Kabbalah and its associations with certain colors: red with judgment and punishment, black with war, and green with love. But, true to form, it adds a new and inspiring concept, theatrically delivered in a compelling blues-rock melody with atmospheric instrumentation and harmonies powerfully driving the message home. Shyfrin wanted to describe time in terms of colors and their moods and how to achieve the best outcomes. All the while, the theme is mirrored by the rhythm of a time-keeping metronome.
“The clear message of Kabbalah is that there is a good time and a bad time to act. The time intervals are not equal; they have their mood, color, and character. My resolution is simple: paint the time the color you want. The brush is in your hand. Paint the time the color of love.”
Inspired by Ecclesiastes’s statement of there being a time to live and a time to die, a time to make peace and a time to make war, “The Pendulum” poses questions as to what time is: a straight line? An unbreakable ring? “The pendulum is the universal law of everything,” explains Shyfrin. “It goes to the left and to the right. That’s life - there’s no other choice. It’s very difficult to keep the pendulum near the point of equilibrium. That’s one of the interesting and mysterious aspects of time, that there is a right time for everything, and we should all remember that; if you do something at the wrong time, the results could be catastrophic.”
“Black Hole” is inspired by the event horizon, the mysterious scientific phenomenon in which no light can escape from a star. It’s an analogy for the passing of time. Present moments and experiences fall into the black hole of the past and linger only in the memory.
“Nobody knows what’s inside a black hole,” he says, warning that to get too close to the surface risks being swallowed up. “This horizon is actually the edge of time, because if you cross it, you will never return. We are at the edge of time - behind us is a black hole.”
“Point A, Point B” explores life from its beginning to its end. While in that time between birth and death, we can enjoy an abundance of things, material or otherwise, beyond “point B,” Shyfrin says, we can take only love with us. “Point B is not the end of the story,” he adds with a smile.
Love was a key theme of his debut album, in particular the unconditional love he felt from his grandparents with whom he lived as a child in 1960s Ukraine. There, in a semi-underground apartment, his parents and grandparents crammed into one room. And when his parents later took a bigger apartment, the first thing they bought for their newfound space was a piano.
Shyfrin’s father insisted that he study music. At the age of seven, he was sent to a school of music, from which he graduated at 14, having trained classically on piano, and studied the history and theory of music and choral singing.
He remembers the jazz playing in the family apartment: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald. His parents bought him sheet music so he could play along.
Music-playing lay dormant for a few decades. Yet, even when Eduard emerged from the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys with a degree in Metallurgy and a profound understanding of physics (he gained his PhD after university, when working at the metallurgical mill in Ukraine), despite having not played an instrument for 30-something years, music had always been there.
Several years later, Shyfrin returned to playing when the 2020 lockdown afforded him the time. He and his wife Olga, with whom he has three children, had moved to the south of France, where he resumed lessons in piano, guitar, and vocals, and went to weekly karaoke sessions to practice.(He also participated in Alpine skiing, power yoga, and martial arts.) The guitar and piano playing came back very quickly. “I’m a man of action,” he explains. “If I do something, I do something regularly; otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. It’s my approach in life.”
Although it never crossed Shyfrin’s mind that he would compose songs, with the firm belief that “life must be fun,” this man of action thought ‘why not create a band and play for family and friends?’ His vocal teacher, Lizzy Parks, introduced him to distinguished local musicians, and soon they were playing summer gigs, with Shyfrin on rhythm guitar and vocals.
He also immersed himself in music - not with any ambition to compose, but just to enjoy the music. Then he began to learn jazz chords. As a mathematician and physician, he quickly understood all these ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, and he practiced piano and guitar daily.
In September 2022, he wrote his first song, “I See Your Eyes.” He thought it was a one-off, but his vocal teacher, Lizzy Parks, told him that he would continue to compose. She was right.
And now, just as in his childhood, music is once again part of his daily life since he discovered his flair and passion for songwriting. “I’m not a typical artist,” he says, referring to his lack of stage performances and Instagram posts. “And my music is not trendy. I’m not writing pop music or rap. But some people like it.”
As ever, the goal is simply to write good music - and nothing predictable. For this mathematician is all too aware of the science of writing a song and the obvious chord combinations. And everything, he says, must be bigger than the sum of its parts, in line with the scientific and philosophical concept of holism. “The composition is an indivisible whole between music, lyrics and vocals. If you’ve managed to strike bingo and great holism, then it will strike people. That’s when it will enter the souls of other people.”
In the Shadow of Time may be a bold enterprise, but the more one delves into it, the more one is drawn into its captivating world. “Self-expression is a radically new era for me, and the process of composing is absolutely new,” says Shyfrin. “It’s interesting that it came at the age of 62. There is a time for everything.” The time for Shyfrin Alliance is now.
This article was written in cooperation with Eduard Shyfrin.