Erdem Helvacioglu
Turkish lyricism meets guitar electronica
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY When you’re caught up in the thick of it, all those cute, clichéd little epithets about turning life’s lemons into lemonade, spinning grave fuck-ups into rapturous inspiration, and the like, hardly seem to hold any wisdom whatsoever.
Things suddenly went awry for Turkish composer and performer Erdem Helvacioglu while flying to California to headline at the International Live Looping Festival in 2007. During the flight, he opened up his laptop and, to his horror, it was completely wrecked—it wouldn’t even boot up. The gig wasn’t as prestigious as playing Carnegie Hall, but it was important—it was Helvacioglu’s first headlining slot in North America, and it was also his first time appearing as a performer across the pond. Having been flagged as one of Turkey’s leading composers of electroacoustic music, he had presented his work in multichannel diffusion in North America, but this time, following the success of his recording Altered Realities, he had come armed with his acoustic guitar, a laptop, and a suitcase full of new and fairly unfamiliar hardware gadgets.
Image by: Tunc Aras.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.
