October 7 attack: Last DJ at Supernova festival looks back

The past few months, he has jetted about the world a great deal. In September, he was in the US. In August he DJed in Brazil, and shortly afterward, he flew to Berlin. He has also just issued a new track: “Cyber Fever” celebrates a “magical world,” as a computer voice announces. More colorful, more beautiful, more cheerful than reality.
When Artifex — Yarin Illovich’s stage name — performs as DJ, he dances on the stage, animates the crowd, jumps high to his beats. If you did not know what he experienced a year ago, these party scenes would not give you any indication of it.
But his eyes have seen things that a person can barely come to terms with. Yarin Illovich is a survivor of the terror attack on the Supernova festival in Israel on October 7. He is the last DJ to have performed at the festival — the DJ who, on the morning of the Hamas assault, first got the crowd dancing, then abruptly stopped the music.
When we met Llovich in Berlin, he seemed nervous. He told us that he had given few interviews so far, and only in Israel. But, he said, speaking in English might help him to distance himself so he could talk about what happened on October 7 without reliving that day in all its brutal details.
“It was still nighttime,” is what he recalled of the moment when he began presenting the music. It was 5.35 a.m. — for Ilovich, the perfect time of day because, just after that, dawn slowly began to break; the sky became brighter with every passing minute.
“For me, that’s something special, especially at a psytrance party,” Ilovich said. Psytrance is short for “psychedelic trance,” an up-tempo style of dance music with spheric sounds. 
“This change between the dark and the light is a bit mysterious. It is the first moment that everybody sees each other. You can see the smiles of people on the dance floor; it’s a moment full of energy and fulfillment,” he said.
More than 3,000 people were celebrating on this morning of October 7 to psychedelic beats amid a desert landscape. A colorful tent roof was put up over the dance floor, the venue was artfully decorated. Many visitors were imaginatively made up, wore striking jewelry to complement their tattoos. Quite a few had taken psychedelic drugs. The festival grounds were meant to look like a magical world, an alternative reality, even back then. The venue is only 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) from the border fence to the Gaza Strip.
Yarin Llovich did not notice the first rockets, which were shot at Israel from Gaza a few minutes before 6.30 a.m. He also did not react when a few party visitors discovered parachutists bearing down on them from the Gaza direction. He was only concentrating on the music, the right beat. “When you are DJing, your body is filled with energy and adrenaline. You don’t feel anything but the dance floor,” he said. 
But then one of the festival’s producers came up to him from behind and said in his ear: “Shut down the music!”
Llovich asked, “Shut it down?” The producer replied, “Yes, shut it down! We have Code Red.”
 6.29: Artifex turned the music off. Silence. And the crowd booed. “Code Red, Code Red!” the producer called to the dance floor. The scene is recorded on videos.
Illovich recalled that there was no panic at first, even though there was barely any place to take shelter in the desert. In Israel, everyone has experienced a rocket alert at some stage. But then hundreds of rockets came. Backstage, he looked after a German friend who, in contrast to most of the Israelis, was already having a panic attack. He helped her and others who wanted to leave in a car — and stayed at the festival site himself even when the friends rang up and told him they were being shot at on the road.
“I thought: There are many guards here. I didn’t feel unsafe,” Llovich said.
At around 7 a.m., militants from Hamas, — which is classed as a terrorist group by Germany, the US, the EU and others —  and other Islamist fighters reached the venue of the Supernova festival. Like many others, Illovich tried to find protection near the cars in the car park, but by this stage there was already chaos: Cars got in each other’s way driving out, and entrances were blocked. Shots were fired from close range. Hundreds, including Illovich and some friends, ran onto the adjoining field.
“They’re shooting at us; people get shot and fall down. People get scared and fall down. People are drunk and fall down,” Llovich said. A friend who was running for her life with him began to vomit; he dragged her on and told her not to look back.
On this October 7, militant Islamist fighters from the Gaza Strip killed more than 360 visitors to the Supernova festival. Forty-four were abducted to the Gaza Strip as hostages, and many were injured. Altogether, some 1,200 people were killed and 251 hostages taken to Gaza during the attack by Hamas on Israel.
Yarin Ilovich survived. He and several friends managed to reach the nearby kibbutz of Re’im, where a few police officers tried to fight off the attackers. For hours, he stayed hidden under a patrol car, heard via police radio that people everywhere were being killed and how police begged for their lives. And also the constant, desperate call: “Where’s the military?”
“I think that was one of the worst situations,” he said of the walkie-talkie exchanges. “You could hear people saying, ‘They’re killing us.'” But the police managed to bring Illovich and a few others to Ofakim, a 15-minute drive.
“For me, it was really apocalyptic,” he recalled of the drive, “Nothing but desert and burned vehicles and bodies.” But even in Ofakim there was a state of war. Only on the morning of October 8 were he and three of his friends in safety.
In the first months after the attack, Llovich related, he went to psychotherapy every week. But the best therapy for him was music, he said. Music was a “safe space.” The place where he felt safe and happy. Even now.
“We will dance again” — the survivors of the massacre came up with this slogan. It is an act of defiance, of resistance, that is meant to express: We won’t be beaten. We won’t let our belief in a magical, a different world, be taken from us.
But not all manage this.
In the weeks and months after October 7, numerous reports of sexual violence, rapes and other atrocities at the Supernova festival emerged. Survivors tell of heavy depressions and how they can no longer come to terms with their lives. Israeli therapists have reported several suicides.
In the past few weeks, DJ Artifex has repeatedly performed for the “Tribe of Nova.” That is what the community of Supernova party fans has called itself for years. They have become a community of survivors, who have met up regularly since October 7 to grieve, to speak, to heal body and soul with yoga, meditation and music. All very much in the spirit of the psytrance idea, which was partly conceived by hippie trail travelers in Goa. A loving community, is how many fans describe the Nova concept.
This is where Illovich is drawn. He deliberately stays away from most demonstrations against the Israeli government, even though he makes it apparent how little he thinks of the current Israeli leadership. He also deliberately watches few news reports, whether about the war in Gaza or about the hostages that are still held in the Palestinian territory.
Yarin Illovich says he is a positive person who believes in better times to come. He does not want to be seen as a traumatized victim, as someone who is broken. He wants to be someone who helps others. Who gives the survivors from the festival the chance to come to terms with what they have experienced.
For the Nova community, DJ Artifex does not just play psytrance music. Over and over again, he also plays exactly the same set that he interrupted at 6.29 a.m. on October 7.
“Many people tell me that it is like a closure for them to hear me again and that the set is finished and doesn’t stop in the middle,” he said. He plays the music to its end as should have happened in a different reality.
This article was originally published in German