How do you write, how do you make music for something that is so poetic, so urgent, so thoughtful, so moving, that it carries a time with and within it?
What sounds, colors, harmonies and dissonances recall all those passionate dystopias that make up the apparent futility of a present? Accesses to time and space, especially musical ones, demand hope. But what if hope is no longer a category in a now that frees itself from its past without a future?
“We lie soothingly on nothingness and we cover all cracks,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in a poem in 1899. More than 100 years later, it is necessary to make these cracks perceptible again, to remember them, to transfer them into music.
In “upon nothingness, there” Marc Sinan’s contemporary composition, which processes historical original recordings of Armenian prisoners of war from the First World War, meets the abstract pieces of Oğuz Büyükberber. Fragments of Anatolian music meet improvised plateaus. Abstract yet sensual, the duo’s music creates a space for the increasingly difficult to say. Büyükberber and Sinan couple the apparent opposites so skillfully that an unmistakable musical symbiosis is created. For many years, the two musicians have been connected by a great musical and personal closeness, which is fully reflected in this project.
“A shining example of intuitive music making” -Deutschlandfunk, August 8, 2018.
