If I were to give a simple description of my new album in a sentence or two, a swift tag for the busy to lay eyes on before listening, then I would say it is definitely and most honestly an album on love that is composed of love songs. It is, more specifically, on the loss of romantic love in the most plain and simple and raw and stupid and human manner. It is about that very complete, wholesome anguish one steps in after such a loss, a specific kind of pain, a silent one composed of absence; hence Silentio/Silence. It is about a significant other, like many similar works before it, conceived under candle light in a small room, smeared by a certain angst reminiscent of the core existential conceptions.
From a storytelling perspective, what has happened factually doesn’t matter, as the events are quite specific and everyday, contemporary and lie within a casual chain in the universal archive. This, for me, is the uninteresting part. What I am interested in is what remains when the dates, times, events and names get stripped down one by one, leaving the most primitive and essential, leaving something of an indestructible nature: a universal condition that spans beyond what is human. One of the best conversations one can have concerning those universal conditions, I believe, revolve around dreams. Consequently, I have found dream analysis to be the best form to communicate the ideas I dug out from under Silentio EP.
So, what I am trying to get to is, in the midst of the album process I have experienced a couple of dreams or similar dream states which I have found back then to be quite enigmatic. Those dreams of day and dreams of night were brutally occupied by certain visuals of longing, disappointment, regret and confusion in all its glorious shapes. As it happens in times like these, I immediately connected the dream states with my lost love and also the album that I was unknowingly embarking on those days, knowing I could have no viable proof on those psychological matters that are in any way feasible but can only crawl through things instinctually. The most important one of these ‘visions’, the one that was the most vivid and exciting and in fact aesthetically pleasing for me was when I saw a baglama, a traditional Turkish and Middle Eastern Instrument, burning in the woods. I have written it in a notebook somewhere then and reflected on the vision again and again, thinking about what it meant, both in an individual and collective sense.
The image had a certain viral effect on me. It multiplied, grew and occupied my aesthetic visions heavily; in a manner that disposed of any other image that had prominence back then. Some of the songs I was working on at that time that relied on a certain imagery on my mind seem to be replaced by the baglama, with the ritualistic destruction of it and there I stood, confused, not being able to really think about it but feeling it and connecting with it, giving the image a certain religious value.
It was during that phase that I thought it was a good idea to burn my own baglama, one that is used at different parts of the album in various shapes and forms, almost always heavily distorted as if burning. With two of my good friends, one of whom was responsible for the picture on the artwork, we went into the woods and did a ceremony burning the baglama as close as we can to the aforementioned dream. It was a joyful, blissful and even exhilarating experience that provided a certain feeling of closure that was much needed back then.
A couple of months have passed and I have found myself with the opportunity to travel to Eastern Anatolia with a documentary crew and meet with the best traditional practitioners of this very instrument I have burnt, baglama. Immediately the intention of solving the maps of meaning under that specific dream content came rushing back to me. At that time the album was ninety percent done and I was starting to see the big picture although I wasn’t fully isolated from the enchantment of the creative process yet. I have spent those weeks, in harsh set conditions, travelling through seven eastern Anatolian cities with the great consolation of visiting the only remaining masters of baglama and the cultural and religious setting surrounding.
Traditional players of baglama in Anatolia are almost always deeply religious and belong to a school of religious thinking called Alevism, although there are regional differences within that umbrella term. At Alevi villages playing baglama or being a virtuoso is not simply a manner of skill and show but it’s also a path: music, art, worship, ritual, they are not different things but they together can be seen as one unified action for the constitution of a good life; a wholesome one that is worth living. Being more experienced on that path, on that way of living and acting, necessitates the practitioner to be better at playing the baglama and the traditional songs but also necessitates singing honestly from the heart, cherishing ones family and neighbours, cultivating kindness and manifesting love to the planet, never lying and always caring for the community.
There is usually a particular name attached to the individual names of these musicians and public figures: Aşık, meaning “the one in love”. This ‘Love’ for them, first and foremost, is the love of god that is manifested through the creations of god. The musicians, although maybe swifter in tapping into that source, do not have the exclusive rights to that love; what they do is quite ordinary. Yet, if they are successful, it becomes ordinary in the most profound sense. It’s not necessarily an advantage of genes and early upbringing that make them better practitioners of this philosophy but just like it is in the more familiar Western way of doing things, only through compassionate discipline and devotion they can be better examples of their ideas, whether that be about achieving to be more honest or playing the strings more gracefully. Building up on this very idea of the baglama player or Aşık, it is not hard to see why they carry such religious and social authority, why people gather around them and listen to their songs carrying history, philosophy, religion and love, why they ask them their opinions on manners hard to unfold and even get psychological support from them.
The Asik doesn’t exclude singing on love in its most 21st century sense, but it primarily sings about transcendental love, the love of god’s children and the love of community and rebellion and pain and food and disaster and the love for both the dead and the alive. For the Asik love is never about or bound to a certain person or event but it is about circles and motions and waves and we take part in and rejoice in what was already there and will continue to be there after we humans have perished. In love, it seems that we are witnessing more than we create, gardening more than we engineer. When we stumble upon love, better than stumbling upon a great piece of art, sublime associations of the most novel kind manifest itself upon experience and we get a glance of the infinite and we are inspired; something takes us out of the everyday and gives us a chance to live like gods. And like all the stories of people who try to get close to the experience of the gods, it is a task of utmost seriousness and discipline but also of balance, lightheartedness and flow. So, in the end, my sense is that the best we can be is the particular carriers of love and manifest it throughout our limited days on earth as much as we get to. The better we get at that, the better artists of the baglama we become.
For the purpose of a conclusion, how can we interpret my dream in reference to all those I have learned? Is baglama love? Is it a symbol for tradition? Is it women (talking from a male-centric perspective) or is it the land? Is it simply art? Is it god or a god’s eye that we peek through? Is baglama, baglama? I think there is some sort of a fully formed argument within the story I have told, that baglama stands for all. Because everything listed above seems to be, from an Aşık’s perspective, basically but brutally, incarnations of love. Particularly, for the interpretation of this certain dream but unavoidably beyond.
The baglama, thus burns for the anguish of the lost love and lost opportunity but also burns for every other kind of anguish everywhere else, be it imposed by state or nature or oneself or the other. The baglama, by being burned, becomes fire and like every fire, it has the capacity to destroy if you don’t handle it well, even extending to catastrophic scales. If handled well with care and expertise and patience, it can also be an essential source of warmth, a place where we gather around in circles, feed each other, share and tell stories. This is the story I am telling.
Listen to Silentio here
