Mazgal

Mazgal — a grating, a drain cover — is a twenty-minute piece of theatre by Tiyatro Obs, directed by Ümit Çırak, staged in Istanbul in 2018, for which I designed the sound.

The whole play takes place at street level, at the height of a drain, and the sound was built from what can be heard from there: footsteps overhead, traffic as a low pressure, water moving below, voices arriving from above as fragments. I recorded the material in the Istanbul streets around the theatre and shaped it into a continuous underscore with almost no music in it — a single sustained tone, appearing twice — so that when the one sung phrase arrives at the end it feels like something let in through the grating.

A short piece, and one of the ones that taught me how much a room can hold before it needs a note.