Bio

"What's a man anyhow, if not alone collecting facts?"

I always felt indecisive about what results in a more virtous dharma: following the intrinsic motivation to create things and the pressure one puts on themselves purely because of this; or living the life embracing the insignificance of things, knowing we are just passing by, and being in peace with this reality. The former is what drove me to take on almost all my creative endevours and academical pursuits, and the latter is what made me feel comfortable mentally, when I needed it the most.

In 2018, an especially musically productive era began for me when I was writing songs with my acoustic guitar filled with the musical and lyrical inspirations from the "Üçüncü Yeniler" wave of the Turkish indie music, and from one of my favourite musicians to this day, Ben Howard.

It was the sincere, down-to-earth, at times absurdist, and yet still very much emotional qualities of the Üçüncü Yeniler that resonated with me deeply. Especially Yüzyüzeyken Konuşuruz's "Evdekilere Selam", and for me the pinnacle of the genre, Büyük Ev Ablukada's "FIRTINAYT" were very large inspirations. And Ben Howard, who influenced me in many ways, from his percussion guitar from his early days, the alternative-tunings that change the complete vibe of the instrument for each song, the fingerstyle technique that makes the listener feel like they are listening to 3 guitars playing at the same time from Every Kingdom; the dark, electric, ambient, delay and reverb heavy, sometimes aggresive and explosive atmosphere that Ben Howard and his band members create with "Burgh Island" and "I Forget Where We were"; to the care-free and mature "Noonday Dream", filled with beatiful poetry and sonic soundscapes, his music influenced me in a lot ways.

This era in my life led me to write a number of songs, and in the summer of 2018, I came together with my friends Ilım Yeşilyurt and Batuhan Özden to record 4 of them and make my first official release, Deneysel EP. In the following year, I have also written and recorded two singles "Dünler ve Önceleri" and "Bekle Beni", and released Deneysel (Deluxe), as a full length album on Youtube.

I released these songs in a span of 2 years, however, they were not quite the result of my work in those 2 years. I always more felt like they were more the result of the music I was making for the previous 6 years before that. And now that I had released them and "got them out my system", I wanted to evolve, change, make different things. Also with the effect of my studies where I was focusing on electronic and digital signal processing, I got more and more interested in electronic music. Having came from a folk origin, artists who originated from a more acoustic style and proceeded to experiment with electronic music, still very much being able to convey emotional depth such as Radiohead with "Kid A" and, more recently, Bon Iver with "22, A Million" influenced me quite heavily. I remember the time after I bought a MIDI keyboard and started playing with the synthesizer digital instrument it came with. It felt like I had just discovered an endless sea of possible sounds and ambiences.

Throughout this period, I have first released my two-song single "Solaris", and then released my second EP, "As a Stranger Give It Welcome".
I was mostly interested in maturing my music, not necessarily through darker tones, but at times through more simple and playful ones, and at times through more sophisticated ones. I was interested in the usage of more instruments, exploring the explosive drums, the quirky strings and the colorful synths which are all very apparent in the first track of the EP, "Rainbow on a Summer Night". What I was also having a blast playing around with was the vocal harmonizers. I was so caught up by this effect in fact (also influenced by Bon Iver's 715 - CR∑∑KS), that I made my own Prismizer effect for my finishing project (also hoping to use it in one of my own songs).

This was also my first release where I had lyrics in English. Working on these songs, I had considered many times to perhaps only release them on Soundcloud. Soundcloud had been kind of a "safe place" for me until then where I would just put on my weird experiments and whatever I was doing without thinking too much about it. I had also considered releasing them on Spotify, but under a different name. Since they were stylistically quite different than what I used to do, I didn't feel like that was 100% "me".

But how do you define what you are? Is it your mental conception of who you are? or Is it what you do? Well, after giving some thought to it, I said "I made these songs, and thus, it is me".

I gave them welcome.

One day, in the summer, in a period where I was listening to a lot of John Martyn and Nick Drake, I sat down with my guitar and started imagining myself in mediaval green pastures with a cold wind pushing me back as I'm calmly and happily trying to find my way to my warm home. With the delicacy of the folk songs surrounding me, I played around with a few chords and lyrics. Months later, in the Belgian winter, both the lyrics I wrote that day, and the chords I played around with, parted ways to be their seperate songs. Notably, the chord progression I was so proud of that day ended up creating the basis of a Talk Talk inspired song I've made (so much so that the name of the file on my computed was "talk talk experiments"), "İt dalaşı".

Another day in the summer (you could say it was a fruitful one, though not the most fruitful as far as my personal life was concerned), I took my guitar, my MIDI keyboard, my iPad, and went to my saxophonist friend's house. We've been close friends since high school, have been playing together ocasionally, and been wanting to actually make a song together for a while. We found a few nice jazzy/lofi chords, and started experimenting on top. In about a total of 8 hours, we had a song. We both had experienced moving to new places recently and had vivid memories of cold mornings full of luggages and coats to carry towards the unknown. That kind of ended up being the idea about the song and we decided to call it something along the lines of "Don't miss the morning train" (which we did not 🥸).

Until this point, I was always quite impatient about releasing my new songs, to share them with the world (almost as much as I was reluctant to actually sharing them with people by being active on social media). But this time, something was different. I wanted to give time to my songs. I wanted to let them sit for weeks, months, maybe even for years. I let them stay where they were, worked on new songs as they came, and when I felt like it, dove back into them and worked on them some more. I wanted to give them time to mature. I shared them with my other musician friends who were kind enough to record their own stuff on top of them, which gave them even more character. I loved the results. With every single song I made during this period, I'm glad they took their time and became what they ended up being. This section would become way too long if I were to discuss and explain the inspirations and the process of each song, but in May of 2021, I released my first full-length album İzlenimler