Istanbul

Istanbul is a six-and-a-half-minute electroacoustic piece made with the French trombonist and multi-instrumentalist Simon Sieger — my partner in the duo that became äbädä — and released on the Sanri Records compilation Noise Ground.

It is a portrait of the city made by two people, one of whom was from there and one of whom had just arrived. The material is field recordings — ferries, the call to prayer arriving from several mosques at once and slightly out of phase, the Bosphorus traffic, a street seller, a cat — and two instruments: my voice, and Simon’s trombone, which in this piece mostly breathes and growls rather than plays notes. We treated the city as the score, following the density of its sound across a single imagined day, and let the instruments be two bodies walking through it, occasionally speaking.

It is the first thing we made together, and the beginning of a long collaboration.