A blog for selected texts of Basak Senova in various books, catalogues, and magazines. Some of the texts posted are copyright, and their holders are indicated.


30 March 2010

SONIC NOTES

printed in Urbane Realitaten: Fokus Istanbul. Martin Gropius-Bau Berlin - Küstlerhaus Bethanian GmbH, Berlin, 114-125.
ISBN 3-932754-57-3

(both in English and German)
© Martin Gropius-Bau Berlin - Küstlerhaus Bethanian GmbH. 2005


A set of short notes, records and quotations for Istanbul’s sonic-scene extracted from research periods of NOMAD projects

the launch

By 2002, several online projects had already emerged out of a loosely defined, virtually connected and geographically scattered group consisting of curators, artists, graphic designers, architects and engineers. Slowly stratifying out of a cloud-like collective over a series of 'physical' projects, NOMAD was solidifying. A project in Graz, Austria became the first practical proof of this mindset as a working condition. We produced the exhibition of this project together; NOMAD physically became alive.

At that time, most of the group members were living abroad -as nomads move with various flows; then we started to go back to Istanbul one by one. It was already 2003, and we were willing to implement a project on sound. It was easy to do a visual project, it was even easier to just put an ordinary show in one of the “art spaces”, but it was hard to talk about sound-art within the local network. At a certain point, we even felt that we had already lost our track with the geography. When we completed the project, calling it “ctrl_alt_del”, it became “the first sound-art festival of the city”. Yet, we managed to realize this project by pushing the nodes of our international network and linking them with the local actors and situations.

ctrl_alt_del by NOMAD

The project was developed by Paul Devens, Emre Erkal and Başak Şenova in collaboration with Hedah, Marres, MIAM, and Istanbul Technical University. All through the month of September 2003, the project manifested itself in two cities, Istanbul and Maastricht, in multiple formats: CD release, panels, workshops, performances, web site presence, exhibition, and CD-ROM. ctrl_alt_del aimed at introducing sound-art to Turkey through the combination of pioneering names and experimental new approaches. More than 30 people from 16 different countries contributed to the project.

As a multi-layered analogy, the title ctrl-alt-del has been chosen to underline several interrelated phenomena that indicate new possibilities which emerge out of the current situation, standing on a new plateau of freshly flattened and compressed ground. This new plateau dictates redefinitions of sonic processes, together with the re-mapping of geography with regard to new modes of production and performance.

In the same line of thought, ctrl_alt_del has also aimed to occupy uncharted time-zone of restarting that signifies a rupture, which dilutes knowledge from technology by blurring the boundaries of perceptual habits and aural experimentation.

pioneering and guiding local sources inhabited in the fabric of the city for NOMAD

ZeN is a ground-breaking band of the alternative music scene in Istanbul which has fused the energies taken from various bodies of the modern era’s radical inputs such as dada, punk and psychedelic together with Sufi transcendentalism, Turkish folk music, gypsy tunes, historical and contemporary music schools embedded in the city's memory. It was an alternative band founded in the 80’s, and in the mid 90’s shifted to a music group called BabaZula. Their work is an amalgamation of recorded natural sounds with both traditional and modern acoustic and electronic musical instruments with electronic effects. Starting out by improvisations, later fixed into musical elements, the group has developed their unique method of “defined improvisation” for their production.

Fairuz Derin Bulut was founded in Istanbul in 1996. Initially, their music was a mixture of rock, oriental, funk, and arabesque. However, the band later started to compose from all the sounds they recorded on the streets and in their studio.

Anabala is a multidisciplinary project concentrating on Istanbul’s sounds and cult. The project consists of two artists: Murat Ertel and Ceren Oykut. They create multi-disciplinary pieces by taking the aspects of humour, parody and surprise as the basic elements of their performances. Anabala took its name from a passage in which they recorded actual and modified sounds to produce tracks by mixing them on a daily basis in central Istanbul at the beginning of the millennium. All those mixes formed their first album. They are still proactive in the sound-art scene of Istanbul.

Since 1986, Serhat Köksal -aka 2/5 BZ- has been performing with tapes, samplers, saz, darbouka, electronics, drums, vocals and spoken word. The style varies from traditional music with experimental electronic sounds, to improvisation with elements that stem from Turkish cinema. He also makes audiotapes, photocopy fanzines, stickers, CDR, flyers, posters, and collages from cut-up video works of the 70’s and 80’s Turkish melodrama and action films, political propaganda, and media imageries of social phenomena. He is especially very proactive in the circulation of European sound festivals and events.

Zafer Aracagök, aka SIFIR, has been influenced to a great extent by contemporary French theory, which he reflects in his sound-works. At some point, he has worked towards the deconstruction of the image/speech hierarchy. Along with sound installations, he has performed in various national and international festivals and projects. He has also released numerous electronic music CDs.

two schools

Yıldız Technical University, Audio Design Department

brief information by Alper Maral, the Head of the Department: Yıldız Technical University Audio Design Department was founded in 1998, and since then, the department has had an important role in the contemporary academic life of Turkey regarding music technologies and composing through the focus it has placed on electro-acoustic music and new trends such as audio/sonic arts. Ahmet Yürür, one of the founders of the faculty, established the “İlhan Mimaroğlu-Bülent Arel Archives”. I Alper Maral, am a composer and musicologist, and I have started to lecture on the course “Audio Arts” in 2003, as an introduction to new media and its concepts. I have also been giving a series of seminars regarding different topics of electronic or environmental music since 1999. Eventually, the whole faculty has been introduced to sonic arts, and various collective exhibitions, performances, events, and publications have been realized by the faculty members and students.

ADD is also a center for regular concerts and events focusing on electro-acoustic music. In 2003, I developed the project DTP – Ensemble in which students participate. This ensemble aims to realize perpetuum mobile by combining theories on musicology with creative and productive compositions in order to obtain a non – stable performance unity.

Istanbul Technical University, Center for Advanced Music Research (MIAM)

a brief information by Pieter Snapper, director of the recording studio at MIAM: MIAM was founded by Cihat Aşkın and Kamran İnce in 1999. The international faculty arrived in Istanbul about two weeks after the earthquake on August 17, 1999, which set a very dramatic, serious tone for our first months in the city. In general, MIAM was established to provide graduate (masters and doctoral) education in areas that were underrepresented in Turkey - for example, forward-looking acoustic composition and electroacoustic composition, recording technology (which became SED), ethnomusicology, historical musicology, music theory and performance.

The SED (Sound Engineering/Design) faculty – Pieter Snapper and Reuben de Lautour – consists of sound artists who are also audio engineers - and that is an unusual combination. Generally there are people who record and there are people who do the artistic content, and frequently the two sides do not appreciate each other (to say the least). One of the original ideas then of MIAM was to bring the two sides together – and it has worked out better than anyone even expected.

Besides faculty and students, the third critical player at MIAM/SED is the studio complex. It was designed by me with Recording Architecture of London, and is housed in the original TRT television studios from the 1950’s (on the ITU Maçka campus). It is set up for music recording with a very large live room (which doubles as a film scoring and THX projection space), and a large 5.1 control room with a glorious ATC monitoring system. It is an unusual facility in that it is used for sound engineering and sound art classes, as well as commercial sessions. The goal is 50/50 educational/commercial, but at the moment it is in such demand that the commercial use has the slight advantage. Fortunately, however, the students learn immensely from their interaction with commercial clients, and the engineers who wish to enter the industry upon graduation already have the necessary professional contacts. For the sound artists it shows a multitude of perspectives about what constitutes good sound, and teaches production values which may or may not be employed in their creative work.

a platform

Phonem by Miller
It is an electronic music platform organized annually by KOD Müzik and Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. By bringing outstanding musicians and groups from abroad, it aims to form an international platform for electronic music in Istanbul since 2003.

young ones

Many young groups and sound-artists have started to perform in alternative spaces in İstanbul. Their style varies from analogue to digital; industrial and noise-based experimental sounds to improvisation. Among these groups and young people there are Tolga Tüzün, Aykut Şahlanan, Attila Kadri Şendil, Serkan Emre Çiftçi, Batur Sönmez, Unit, Analog Suicide, Extreme Parking, Dadaloop, Radiophonik, Audio, Werk, Dead Frequencies, Subjekt, AVST, B/S and Teletrans. Also the academic stuff and students of YTU, Audio Design Department –Alper Maral, Cem Ömeroğlu, Emre Can Öziş, and Eray Düzgünsoy- and ITU, MIAM and SED –Pieter Snapper, Reuben de Lautour, Kerem Aksoy, Murat Yakin, Zeynep Bulut, Deniz Arat and Aykut Sahlanan- are taking part in the sound scene of Istanbul with their performances and CD releases.

extracts from interviews with sound-artists

Erdem Helvacıoğlu is an electro-acoustic composer and sound designer, and Emre Erkal is an architect, sound-artist, and electronic-engineer. The city has a central role in their approach and works. While Erdem uses the soundscape of Istanbul as the basis of his compositions to explore the city, Emre, through his sound installations, overlaps and reloads the acoustic aspects with spatial parameters of the given space in the context of the city.

Erdem Helvacıoğlu
question: How does the urban landscape of Istanbul affect your work? In other words, what is the potential sonic material of Istanbul for your work?

Erdem Helvacıoğlu: Soundscape is one of the most important aspects to define a city. It is possible to get cultural and sociological information about the ciy by investigating its sound data. Each city has its own soundscape characteristics, such as Mexico City has completely different characteristics compared to Belfast or New-York. In this respect, to detach details among these differences inspires my work.

My investigation always starts with recording the city with my microphone. Yet, my aim is to discover ‘actual sounds”, therefore, I use various techniques to record secretly in public areas, and most of the time in weird corners of the city. This process also teaches me how to listen. I used this experience for my “a walk through the bazaar” album which was realised by Locustmusic.

I believe that soundscape will be the source that will shape the authenticity and future of Turkish Electronic Music.

Emre Erkal
question: How do you consider the development of the sound-art scene in Turkey (specifically Istanbul) in terms of timing?

Emre Erkal: September 2003 was a hot point in the timeline because of a couple of concurrent events. The first, ctrl_alt_del, was the inauguration of NOMAD, -a dual-city project with legs in Istanbul and Maastricht. The Istanbul part could be taken as the first sound art festival proper in Istanbul. From my point of view, the second event was our artwork ‘Content’ featured in the 8th Istanbul Biennial, a collaboration with Cevdet Erek. Being the only exclusively sound-based work, it was about the city from within the city. This work was about spatial sound: juxtaposing the sonic spatial character of two kinds of spaces, the main hall in the Hagia Sophia and a common shipping container. We wanted to explore the potential of creating a peculiar kind of public space, cohesive around this vessel of juxtaposition.

question: What does it mean to produce sound works in the city of Istanbul?

Emre Erkal: The city itself is a bombardment of sonic material. The variety and amount of sonic output and conditions are baffling, to the point of numbing the dweller. Semantically, the city seems to be over-saturated with all sorts of emission, on the spectrum of sound – noise. Therefore, Istanbul mostly remains indifferent to new infusions beyond the immediate social bubbles.

Given these conditions, circulating tidbits of semantical nuggets would not yield much. It is not wild to conceive of one of the possible modes of operation as one of ‘carving out’, an act defined by utmost physicality. A low-fidelity approach that is almost tactile, literally stealing attention by forced tactility. Another approach is the high-fidelity one: a zenith of perspectival clarity and refinement in hearing. Yet, in the final analysis, both modes boil down to the same ground: refusal of semantic material and desire of physicality.

question: Are these sensibilities coming only from the city?

Emre Erkal: There’s probably more. My interdisciplinary background, both in the fields of study, and modes of reaction, seems to be responsible. More than a practicing architect with a license in electronics engineering, I also had further experience of various levels of academic depth in graphic design, computer graphics, cognitive psychology and music. I conducted scientific research as well as design and curatorial work. It is natural for me to circle around issues of perception and structure.

wrapping up

NOMAD, along with carrying out projects focusing on sound, also establishes a regional-based sound-art archive. Each log assigns another possibility to process the city as a standing reserve for exciting discoveries and perception modes through sound.