I Took a Train to Mars

I Took a Train to Mars is a fourteen-minute piece for cello, electric guitar, voice, keyboard and electronics, written in 2019 for the Istanbul collective Klank.ist, of which I was part, and recorded on the collective’s album V. Dialogs (Ada Müzik, 2020). A new version with additional visuals was given by Ninth Planet in San Francisco in November 2024.

The train to Mars leaves from the part of the imagination that cannot afford a plane ticket. The piece is structured as a journey in a single direction, slow and unstoppable: a low, repeating pulse in the cello and keyboard that never changes speed, over which the guitar and the electronics keep opening windows — a snatch of radio, a distorted chord, a field of static — and closing them again. The voice is the passenger: she sings fragments of an itinerary, names of stations that do not exist, in a register that starts conversational and ends, by the final minutes, somewhere above where a voice should comfortably go.

It is a piece about leaving a city — Istanbul, in my case — and about the strange calm of a departure once it has become irreversible.