Iki Kardes

İki Kardeş — two siblings — is a thirty-minute play by the Istanbul company İkincikat, directed by Eyüp Emre Uçaray and staged in 2015. It was the first theatre production I designed sound for, and the earliest work in this catalogue.

The play is two people in a room who share a past and almost nothing else, and the sound was made from two sources only: a recording of a piano played by one of the actors as a child, and the room itself. The piano recording returns through the evening in fragments, each sibling hearing it differently — clear for one, buried in noise for the other — and the room tone is gradually thickened until the two can no longer hear each other over it. No music was composed in the usual sense; everything was found and placed.

It is where I learned that sound design is composition by other means, and it is the root of everything after it.