The story of Tel Aviv is a convoluted one. Andrew Comer and Jay Kraus met while in second grade in Louisville, Kentucky and inspired by thier Duran Duran records, formed Korova (named after Echo and the Bunnyman's record label) in 1994. After recording a cassette on 4-track the summer after graduating from high school, Andy sent a copy to Teenbeat.

"At the time, Teenbeat listened to the tape and it ended up on the "no" pile. 6 months later, Teenbeat director, Mark Robinson was leaving for Europe and needed something to listen to on his journey. He picked up a tape randomly lying around the Teenbeat house and popped it in the deck to record his favorite Paul Williams songs. At that moment for some reason, however, he decided to listen to the tape first. The tape at that point had no cover or any other information other than the name Korova scrawled upon it. Not only did he not record over the tape, but he took it to Europe and fell in love with it.

Armed with nothing but the name of the band, Mark put up notes on the internet saying that he was searching for "Korova." On his birthday, at an Air Miami show in Oberlin, Ohio, Andy came up to Mark and introduced himself. The rest is history.

Learning that the name Korova had been used already, many times, Andy and Jay named their band after their favorite Duran Duran song. Oddly enough, Mark Robinson had randomly suggested the name Tel Aviv (the Israeli city) also. Their debut single came out only 3 months later. The songs on single and the debut album were all from the original Korova tape." — from Tel Aviv's bio page (TB 210) 1997.

Tel Aviv had a bit of an obsession with Stand and Deliver. The cassette demo was riddled with clips from the 1988 film, starring Edward James Olmos as Jaime A. Escalante, a hispanic teacher who taught advanced mathematics to inner-city students of East L.A.

The Cigarette 45 (TB 183) held on to all of these clips from the film, but the self-titled Tel Aviv CD (TB 193) left all of them out. These songs here appear as the B-side to this beautifully packaged 7" still available from Teenbeat.

The song "We've Got the Computers" was inspired by a line in the film, and a few years later, with the addition of Ray Sweeten on keyboards and Romania's James Noble producing, Tel Aviv's second album The Shape of Fiction (TB 223) included a different song with the same name which is a far more pure hommage to Stand and Deliver, at least lyrically.

Tel Aviv, continued recording and were set to release a one track 40 minute CD (inspired by the Insides Clear Skin Release), and were rumoured to start work on recording with Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, but nothing materialized.

Note: I choose this weeks MP3 because I just spent the past two days piecing together a computer for a friend of mine. She was given an old computer (A Pentium 1 with 32 MB of RAM, a 1200 kbs modem, and 4 GB of hard drive space), that needed some serious updating. I hadn't built a computer from the motherboard up before so it was interesting building it all and installing a new OS. It was alot of work, but I was without a shower for three days while my landlord was doing some MUCH needed repairs. So I managed to stay clen and she's got a computer. Now we're even.