Everything's Gone Wrong

Everything’s Gone Wrong is a twenty-minute piece for voice, electronics, electric guitar and electric cello, made in Istanbul in 2019 with Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu and Aslı Kobaner — musicians from the Klank.ist collective — and performed by the three of us that May.

It is half composition, half structured improvisation: a written frame of cues, pitch fields and durations inside which the three players listen and react. The title was the working title and then refused to leave. The piece is a slow accident. It opens with a plain, almost pop-like song for voice and guitar, and everything that follows is that song going wrong — the cello’s processing feeding back into the guitar’s, the voice looped and layered until the words lose their order, the tempo dragged and then lost entirely. By the end the three of us are playing inside a single electronic cloud that none of us controls, and the task is to find the song again, which we never quite do.

It was the first time I let a piece be built, in part, by the people playing it, and the beginning of a way of working that later became my duos and collectives.