Marc Sinan and Oğuz Büyükberber

Marc Sinan is a composer and guitarist with German-Turkish-Armenian roots. His compositions have been performed at renowned festivals such as Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the Istanbul Festival, Enjoy Jazz, MaerzMusik Festival at the Berliner Festspiele; at HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts Dresden, GORKI theatre Berlin and Vienna concert house. His pieces toured to different places in Europe, Central Asia and North America and have been broadcasted on the French-German TV channel ARTE as well as numerous radio stations. In 2012, Marc Sinan was awarded an artist-in-residence scholarship by the German Foreign Office for the recently opened Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul and in 2016 he received a fellowship as visiting professor at Whitman College in Washington State, USA.  In addition to international solo appearances and chamber music projects with artists and partners as diverse as the Sonar Quartet, Julia Hülsmann Trio, Jörg Widmann, the Turkish percussionist Burhan Öcal and the Iranian Kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor, Kazakh Zhirau player Ulzhan Baybussinova, Czech violnist and vocalist Iva Bittová, vocalist David Moss, clarinettist Oguz Büyükberber, visual artists Damian and Delaine Le Bas, composer and conductor Andrea Molino; Marc Sinan has also performed as a soloist with orchestras such as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Dresdner Sinfoniker and the No Borders Orchestra.
Sinan and Büyükberber met shortly after the release of Marc’s Fasil album with Julia Hülsmann in 2009, introduced to each other’s music via ECM’s Turkish distributor, Tansu Özyurt. Marc: “Tansu suggested I might like Oğuz’s work, and I did, a lot. His musical approach is both very abstract and very tasteful. So, when I was living in Istanbul for three months in 2012 and had a chance to invite a few musicians for a concert for the Goethe Institute, I contacted him.” That first concert, with Marc, Oğuz and ney player Burcu Karadağ, was based around Sinan’s fragmentation of material by Dimitrie Cantemir, the poet and pioneer in the notating of Ottoman music. Büyükberber continued working with Sinan in contexts including the radio play/audio piece Oksuswhich Marc describes as “a musical road trip through Uzbekistan”, and the “docufictional” music theatre piece Komitas, about the Armenian genocide, which premiered at Berlin’s Gorki theatre in April 2015. The field recordings heard now on Whitewere deployed also in the Komitas project.  For White, recorded in Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in October 2016 and produced by Manfred Eicher, both musicians provide new music. Sinan’s five-part “Upon Nothingness” includes his musical response to recordings of songs of Armenian prisoners deported to Germany during the First World War. These historic field recordings are woven into the fabric of Sinan’s pieces, which also make liberal use of electronics, blurring the distinction, as he puts it, “between the real and the surreal”. OğuzBüyükberber also contributes a series of linked pieces, “There, I-V”, which incorporate completely written areas, guided improvisation and free playing.

http://www.marcsinan.com https://www.oguzbuyukberber.com