Billboard
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An artist manager who had several acts scheduled to play the Paralello Universo festival in Re’im, Israel, near the Gaza Strip, and who was there during the attack on the festival, describes a scene of chaos and terror.
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Raz Gaster had multiple artists playing the electronic music festival, where at least 260 people were killed and others were abducted amid an attack by Hamas operatives Saturday (Oct. 7).
Gaster arrived on site at the festival event at approximately 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, with the party — which had started the night prior — meant to go until approximately 5 p.m. Saturday evening. An offshoot of the Paralello Universo festival brand started in Brazil nearly 20 years ago; the Israel event was called Supernova Sukkot Gathering after the Jewish holiday and was hosting several thousand attendees in a rural location near the Gaza Strip, with a lineup focused on the electronic psytrance genre.
Everything changed, though, when rockets and missiles launched from the Gaza Strip by Hamas starting landing on the site an hour later, part of a widespread attack on Israel.
“Around 6:30 in the morning we started hearing explosions,” Gaster says. “We went out of the backstage and we saw a full bombardment everywhere. It was hundreds of rockets and mortars flying from everywhere and explosions all around us.”
Gaster says that at this point, festival security advised everyone to get down on the floor and put their hands above their heads for protection. But after 5-10 minutes, Gaster says, “the policemen shouted in the microphones, ‘Okay, get in your cars and go.’”
“The moment the policemen said ‘go now,’ I ran,” Gaster recalls. “I didn’t wait, because we know it’s a rocket attack. You need to act quick.”
Because his car was parked near the stage very close to where he was standing, Gaster and three other men — including Universo Paralello co-founder Juarez Petrillo — were able to immediately get in Gaster’s car and drive out minutes later, after Gaster made sure the artists he works with were also in vehicles fleeing the site.
Gaster says he was “driving super fast, not stopping for anything, even when missiles are coming down. My instinct told me don’t stop for shelter, just drive… We drove so fast we didn’t even know what was happening.”
By the time Gaster and the others made it to a villa rented by the production team, located approximately 30 kilometers away from the festival, they had started getting texts and phone calls telling them that minutes after they drove away from the site, Hamas fighters had arrived “with machine guns, with RPGs, with grenades, and just slaughtered whoever they could.”
He says that these attackers arrived by motorcycles, quads and trucks approximately 20 minutes after missiles started landing.
Gaster and those he was with turned the villa into a command center, contacting IDF, other Israeli security services and “all of our friends that we know personally that have firearms that have connections that can go there.”
During this time he and the others were receiving messages from friends and colleagues still on site, who reported that the attackers were shooting attendees in their cars as they attempted to drive away. A friend of Gaster’s messaged to say that the driver of her car had been shot and that she and another friend were pretending to be dead to avoid being killed. He says these women ultimately played dead for five hours before being rescued. As of Sunday (Oct. 8), Israeli rescue service Zaka has reported at least 260 bodies at the site.
“People were hiding in ditches, hiding in bushes, hiding in the woods, hiding wherever you can think of,” says Gaster. “We were getting horrible messages from friends saying, ‘Please help us, they are shooting people next to us.’”
Gaster says it took IDF and special forces a few hours to arrive on site, with those who were there attempting to defend themselves in the meantime.
“At the party there was already a police force, like any licensed party,” Gaster says, “and they were the first ones to try to give assistance by fighting… We are Israelites, so most of us have military experience, and a few from the production managed to kill some terrorists with their bare hands and their weapons.”
Gaster says that the owner of the production company behind the festival, Nova Tribe, killed two of the attackers after taking their guns. Gaster says he and the team at the production villa were being sent on-site locations from various attendees and then sending these locations to the owner, who then went to help these attendees.
“It was 24 hours of working to find as many people as we could and get as many signs of life as we could,” says Gaster.
Universo Paralello was not origintally intended to take place at the Re’im site, with organizers moving it to this location only two days before it started, when another site in southern Israel fell through. The new site at Re’im featured a pair of stages, with the Israeli producer Artifex playing the mainstage when the attack started. Gaster was told that the attackers closed the road into the festival from both sides so attendees could not escape.
Other festival attendees have been abducted by Hamas. As a group of between 15-20 people gathered at the production villa, they, says Gaster, “started seeing videos on social media of hostages and people we know that are kidnapped and bodies we could recognize [as] our friends. Many friends are still missing, and we still don’t know where they are.”
He approximates that there are still 600-700 people missing from the party. All but one artist on the festival lineup has left Israel, with Gaster and others putting artists on any available flight into Europe as airlines canceled flights amid the attacks.
While Gaster had just arrived to his home in the north of Israel when Billboard spoke with him at around 1 a.m. local Israeli time (he says the IDF controls most of the area between where he was and where he lives, so he felt safe to drive home), he says that amid the chaos they are all “still trying to find any signs of life.”
“We are a peaceful community, we are a musical community, we do it for the creation of fun,” says Gaster. “We only wanted to dance and have a good time and enjoy music together, and it turned into a nightmare.”
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As he watched from a suite while Karol G performed at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium on Sept. 8, Ovy on the Drums was nostalgic and teary-eyed. Over 70,000 fans were chanting the Colombian reggaetón star’s biggest hits at the top of their lungs — the majority produced by him.
“I cried that day because there were no words,” he recalls, slouched on a couch in his Miami-area home a few days later. “One day, we are working with the hopes of making it big, that our music will go around the world, and life itself makes sure things happen. God himself has given us these blessings, and it’s because we have worked with love, with dedication, without stopping. We are dreamers and unstoppable.”
After accompanying Karol G on most of her shows during her Mañana Será Bonito summer stadium tour, Ovy (real name: Daniel Echavarría Oviedo) is finally back at his three-story corner house in Doral, Fla., where he resides with his personal manager, Alejandro Muñoz, and his aunt Gloria. He’s relaxed, wearing a neon-green Nigeria soccer jersey and black Nike shorts, and his signature spiky, blond dreadlocks are tamed. It’s a typically hot summer Florida day, but inside, the 32-year-old’s aunt is cooking lunch while he catches up on laundry and sips homemade hibiscus tea. “This is amazing for your health. I drink it every day to stay hydrated,” he says, offering a glass.
As Karol’s longtime producer, Ovy is behind her biggest hits, including “Tusa,” with Nicki Minaj; “Provenza”; “TQG,” with Shakira; “Mi Ex Tenía Razón”; and the Peso Pluma-assisted “QLONA” — which all hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart. But his road to success has not been, as he puts it, “llegué y pegué” (“I came, and I conquered”). In fact, Ovy says he never knew music would be his calling.
Fifteen years ago, Ovy, then 17, was working at a plaza in Medellín carrying bags of chicken and selling disposable party supplies when he realized he had to find a passion if he wanted to succeed in life. His first taste of music production came a few years later, in 2012, when a cousin’s friend offered to install the digital audio workstation FL Studio on his laptop and give Ovy a beat-making crash course.
“From that moment, my life changed. Look, I even have the [company’s] fruity logo tattooed,” he says, flaunting the mango-strawberry ink on his right forearm. “I didn’t know what a melody was, I didn’t know anything [about making music], but when he showed me that program, that was where I, Daniel Echavarría Oviedo, discovered a new planet.”
Devin Christopher
As he practiced each day and sold his first beats for only $5 each, Ovy made headway in the Colombian music scene, working with artists such as Landa Freak, Lorduy and DVX. He also connected with producers Ronald El Killa and La Compañía (the production group of Mr. Pomps, DJ Maff, Migueman and Gotex), whom he credits as the first people to give him an opportunity in the music industry. The latter, which produced Karol G’s 2013 Nicky Jam collaboration, “Amor de Dos,” ultimately connected Ovy with Karol.
“The first day we met, I overheard her talking to her father about needing a DJ for a presentation, and I respectfully offered myself,” he remembers. “At first, she didn’t take me seriously. But about a month later, my friends at La Compañía called me to share the news that Karol wanted me as her DJ.”
After a successful debut performance together at a local university, the duo embarked on a “school tour” across the country while also promoting themselves on local TV and radio. Along the way, Ovy decided to play Karol some of his beats, and they immediately began creating music. The first song they worked on together was “Ricos Besos,” a flirtatious reggaetón track released in summer 2014.
“She was happy because I was the only person who understood what she wanted to express with her sound,” he says. “I remember that we were on a balcony one day when I proposed that we become a team — just like The Rudeboyz with Maluma, Sky Rompiendo with J Balvin — and she told me, ‘Let’s do it!’ ”
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Since then, Ovy — whose style is characterized by minimalist urban-fusion beats backed by edgy keyboards, dramatic violins and hard-hitting drums — has produced a handful of Karol’s bangers, such as “Tusa,” which earned him his first No. 1 as a producer on the Hot Latin Songs chart, and the EDM-fueled “Cairo,” which marked his first Billboard Hot 100 entry.
His work on Karol’s studio albums Unstoppable (2017), Ocean (2019), KG0516 (2021) and the historic Mañana Será Bonito (2023) — the first all-Spanish-language album by a female artist to top the Billboard 200 — ultimately has kept him at No. 1 on the Latin Producers chart for 25 nonconsecutive weeks since February 2020, the third-longest reign atop that chart, following Tainy and MAG. He was less involved on Karol’s latest, Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season), released in August, but still produced three of its 10 songs: “S91,” “QLONA” and “Dispo.”
“I’m taking time for myself,” he says as Gloria serves warm picadillo (ground beef), rice, salad and noodle soup. “It hurts me because I want to be making new music with Karol like the old days. But it’s not a bad thing — it’s just that now I want to focus on my project.”
Inspired by the multihyphenate Dr. Dre, Ovy wears many hats: he produces; he composes; he develops artists under his record label, Big Ligas; and at one point, he even had a singing career — though after releasing music with Mike Bahía, TINI and Danny Ocean, he decided to quit because “Ovy on the Drums has respect as a producer, not as a singer.”
At the dining table, where Muñoz and Gloria join him, Ovy says that moving to Miami in 2020 was the best decision of his life, mainly because it allowed him to grow as a producer. “I got to a point where I asked myself, ‘What am I doing in Medellín?’ I felt like there was nothing more to do. Other than enjoying my country, my family and relaxing, I wasn’t being productive,” he explains. “Once I moved to Miami, I started creating and creating more, and establishing more relationships.”
Ovy on the Drums photographed on September 12, 2023 in Miami.
Devin Christopher
And while he’s best known for his work with Karol G, he has now worked with numerous other artists, including Enrique Iglesias, Zion y Lennox, Camilo, Ozuna, Prince Royce and Peso Pluma. When he hits the studio with those other acts, he prepares thoroughly, studying them, observing their musical styles and making sure to arrive with the best energy.
“He is a master of his craft,” says Leslie Ahrens, senior vp of creative, Latin America at Kobalt Music, where Ovy signed in December 2018. “He can create an entire song by himself — production, lyrics and melody — and 99% of the time, they are hits! Beyond that, when you meet him, you want to be his best friend and confidant. He also has a great sense of humor, and all that is a part of his magic.”
Now, as he shifts his focus to his personal musical projects, Ovy is also planning his next move: expanding to work with mainstream artists.
“I’ve had opportunities. Producers like London on Da Track who has worked with Drake have written to me, but nothing has happened yet because I feel that I need to learn to speak English first,” he says. “If I speak the language very well, I will get along with the mainstream producers and artists and even create a solid friendship like the one I have with artists in the Latin music world. I’m on it right now.”
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In the meantime, he’s preparing his debut album as artist-producer, titled Dr. Drums, which will include features from Karol G, Quevedo, Sech, Ryan Castro and Blessd.
As we finish lunch, he reminds me that his trajectory hasn’t been “llegué y pegué” but rather working hard for his dreams with the hope of one day inspiring others.
“Tomorrow, when I’m not in this industry or in this world anymore, people will simply remember me because I created different music from everything that has ever existed, and hopefully, they will be inspired by the music I made. That’s my goal,” he says with a smile. “Every day I wake up with that hope — with the purpose of leaving a legacy.”
This story will appear in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.

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