"Someone discovered it, put it on the radio in Denmark, and it became a big hit," said Yoav, speaking by phone from a New York studio.
"I think something similar happened in Russia, actually," he recalled. "Someone at a radio station in Russia found my song and started playing it. Something like that happened in Germany, so I had a lot of luck. But it feels like it was meant to happen."
Apart from complicated geography ?€” Yoav said he is currently living "out of a suitcase" between London, New York and Canada ?€” the guitarist is famous for his playing style, which consists of producing dance beats on his acoustic instrument that are then augmented by live sampling and sequencing.
"On the one hand, I'm using the guitar as a percussion instrument and drumming on it, something really influenced by Indian and African music, where there's a lot of percussion," he explained. "But on the other hand, I would describe myself as a DJ on the guitar. I create beats on the guitar and sample the beats live and play over the top of them."
The 28-year-old musician, whose full name is Yoav Sadan, was banned from listening to popular music by his parents (his mother was an opera singer), who wanted him to become a classical pianist. He said he began to play the piano when he was 3 or 4 and sang in choirs when he was 11.
"When I was 10 or 11 years old, I discovered all this pop music, and it was very exciting to me because it wasn't allowed," he said. "So it was my little secret.
"I became obsessed with pop music and wanted to hear it and wanted to write it, because it wasn't allowed."
With a Pixies cover on his debut album "Charmed and Strange," Yoav pays homage to his early years in Cape Town.
"We only had one radio station that played pop music, and there was no way that you would hear a band like The Cure or the Pixies or Radiohead or any of that," he said.
"But there was one cool club where they played all these sorts of music. I was too young to get in, so I had to sneak in, make friends with people to get me into the club, and it was the first place I heard all this music that inspired me."
Yoav performs on Thurs. at 10 p.m. at B2, located at 8 Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa. M. Mayakovskaya. Tel. 650-99-18/09.
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