- The Turkish artist opens new temporal and textural dimensions on this immersive ambient LP.
- We're often drawn to ambient music for its fluidity. Compositional guidelines can be broken down to create soundscapes in which the listener is able to detach from ordinary understandings of space and time. As a Ph.D student in Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University, Ipek Gorgun is intimately familiar with this phenomenon. "I enjoy hearing sonic components that open up to new temporal dimensions," the sound artist, poet, and photographer once said. "And I'm still obsessed with the idea of a never-ending present tense that we keep chasing while making music. No matter how hard we try to hold on to a musical gesture, it always ends up being past."
On her second album, Ecce Homo, Gorgun explores sonic and theoretical motifs she's only touched upon before, to striking effect. 2016's Aphelion was comprised mostly of ominous tones. Last year's collaboration with Ceramic TL, Perfect Lung, was a maximalist full-length that riffed on environmental degradation. Ecce Homo falls somewhere between the two LPs. Its electroacoustic compositions drill deep into your brain, always with a creeping sense of physical and existential pressure.
Ecce Homo is tense and dynamic, changing from the micro (clicks, brief samples, single notes) to the macro (organs, concentrated filters, tenuous changes in melody) at a moment's notice. But the macro moments are where Gorgun really thrives. The grating strings and chaotic vocal ambience of "Afterburner" are terrifying in their intensity. The subtler "Tserin Dopchut" feels like a windstorm, moving suddenly from piercing frequencies to heavy static chaos. "Bohemian Grove" samples an Alex Jones film from 2000, in which the right-wing conspiracy theorist tries to sneak into an elite Northern California gentlemen's club to prove the existence of occult happenings. The track gradually becomes more glitchy and unhinged, to the point where Jones transforms into the satanic demon he's warning us about.
The LP's calmer moments are still heady. "Seneca" drifts with a glacial beauty. "To Cross Great Rivers" re-contextualizes the brightness from "Tserin Dopchut" and "Le Sacre I" into music that soothes and surrounds. Throughout the course of Ecce Homo, no sound consistently holds the same space, mood, or tone. Gorgun asserts this as her method from the outset—the album opener, "Neroli," refracts multiple facets of sound, like a slowly rotating crystal catching the light. Throughout the record, there are gestures toward what has already passed and what will eventually come. With its constant shifts in energy, Ecce Homo succeeds in opening up new temporal and textural dimensions.
Tracklist01. Neroli
02. Afterburner
03. Tserin Dopchut
04. Le Sacre I
05. Le Sacre II
06. Bohemian Grove
07. Seneca
08. Knightscope K5
09. Reverance
10. Mileva
11. To Cross Great Rivers