"This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big," van Gogh

Ozcan Ertek - Starry Night

The Gezi protests changed the political scene in Turkey. It was not just local; it was global and influenced people all over the world. People were in the streets. I wanted to reflect the grouping of people in resistance and establish a relationship between the behaviour of people during  the demonstrations and the ‘flocking behaviour' of animals. Flocking Behaviour is the phenomenon of a global behaviour originating from the interactions of many simple, local behaviours. Body Talk’ is an installation about thousands of bodies who acted together in close proximity during the Gezi Park protests of June 2013. 
It simulates these behaviours found in birds and fish. It may lead to a new understanding of emergent behaviours of people in demonstrations. I focused my energy to control the amount the texture deforms from the flow of sound and the granularity of the texture that represents bodies.

Ozcan Ertek - Body Talk

Three laws devised by Johannes Kepler to define the mechanics of planetary motion. The first law states that planets move in an elliptical orbit, with the Sun being one focus of the ellipse. This law identifies that the distance between the Sun and Earth is constantly changing as the Earth goes around its orbit. The second law states that the radius of the vector joining the planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times as the planet travels around the ellipse. As such, the planet moves quickest when the vector radius is shortest (closest to the Sun), and moves more slowly when the radius vector is long (furthest from the Sun). The third law states that the ratio of the squares of the orbital period for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their mean orbit radius. This indicates that the length of time for a planet to orbit the Sun increases rapidly with the increase of the radius of the planet's orbit.

Ozcan Ertek - Cosmic Scales

In this four minutes ‘proustian’ piece, I generated an audio tale from fragments of childhood memories through forms. It begins with first few seconds of life and continue with birth, childhood and death. It is basically about memories triggered by present. Childhood section mostly deals with ‘Play’ factor brought by Homo ludens, which was an exhibition built on ‘play’ aimed at enhancing the presence of the play factor in contemporary art. 
Childhood is when we learn through play. A return to childhood can be on of the themes behind the experimentation of the avant-garde’s and the creations of many artists who sought to combine art forms with the original states of creation. 

Ozcan Ertek - An Audio Tale

Gibs Auf by Franz Kafka

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was walking to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized that it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me unsure of the way, I did not yet know my way very well in this town; luckily, a policeman was nearby, I ran up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “From me you want to know the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I cannot find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up,” he said, and turned away with a sudden jerk, like people who want to be alone with their laughter.

Ozcan Ertek - Gibs Auf

While at New York, riding the subway was part of my daily routine. During my journeys, I started to become intrigued by the ambient noises. I was also worried about evolving technology rendering these rather ancient, mechanic sounds obsolete. Combined with my interest, this anxiety soon turned into an obsession about capturing and archiving the ambient sounds of the subway and led to my project: New York Electronics, 2013.


Ozcan Ertek - New York Electronics, 2013 V5

It takes time perceive today’s electronic music, it’s because, too much objects and sound events has been squeezed into it. The influence of modern technology led us create, produce and perform complex music with lots of objects. We are producing in bedroom-studio environments. Hours of attentive listening allow us to have musical sounds and musical imagery in our minds. We don’t have economic constraints on the amount of man-hours we can elaborate on our work. We are saturated with influences and inputs almost inevitably make complex, sophisticated and compelling music. 

In contrast to this idea, 'Bedroom Spirit' proposes a collage of textures evoking simple grandiose landscape. It uses disorientation to disable the sense of time, direction and recognition of sound events. By compressing the atmosphere and bringing absolute focus on most distant elements in ‘landscape’, it shows growing obsession with conjuring far-away landscapes and voyages through a style consist of melancholy and Proustian nostalgia.

Cover Art: Aslı Narin

Soundcollage - Bedroom Spirit

I have heard that the moon is moving away from Earth by about an inch each year, at about the same speed at which our fingernails grow. It slowly recedes from Earth. This piece is a speculation on experience of moving further away from the world.
Visual: Selim Kocaaydin

Milkyway

In May 2015, I had a chance to work at the field of architecture with the installation ‘Cut Hands’ using 20 speakers and 20 channels distributed across Istanbul Technical University Macka Building. The building has been constructed by the members of a famous emperial architecture family, Simon and Sarkis Balyan between 1861-1862. In the 19th century, the building housed a artillery that handed over to the Command Gendarmerie at the end of Ottoman period. I responded to its history by utilizing openly aggressive, brutal and violent ambience influenced from primitive warfare. The multi-channel setting invited the listener to navigate their way through time across installation site and engage in the spatial structure of sounds rather than establishing a relationship of listening at a singular sound source.

Ozcan Ertek - Cut Hands

In their search for new timbres, musicians frequently switch roles between composer, instrument designer and performer. New instruments are often designed with the purpose of providing new timbres and effective performances. In the case of live electronic music, the performance with designed instrument or software at a specific time and location becomes the work. As a performer, I realize that a central concern in my work, is to expand expressiveness of my performance by developing new tools and exploring the gestural aspects of my music. I think the optimal performative experience can be achieved by generating a digital musical instrument that built on Godoy’s gestural-sonorous object idea. It should also use sensor technologies to map Smalley’s morphological aspects of sounds and Emmerson’s ‘Local/Field’ space frames.


Vector Lover

''Like any sound obsessive, Özcan Ertek splits his time between a number of different projects. At the top of the list are Eno-inspired ambient explorations under his Soundcollage moniker, as well as the experimental electronic music he makes under the name Seretan. His softly shimmering textures are inspired by his deep love of John Cage, Terry Riley, and all things minimalist and classical, and his self-released compositions led to him scoring the documentary Autumn In Bayrampasa, as well as performing live at Madame Claude in Berlin. When he’s not holding an instrument in his hands, it’s a safe bet he’s somewhere at the controls: either behind the mixing desk, applying the training he had as a sound engineer from Istanbul’s MIAM studios, or else on the decks, DJing frequently in clubs like Arkaoda and Peyote.''

RMBA 2013 New York 

Seretan 
soundcloud.com/iamseretan

soundcollage

soundcollagetr.bandcamp.com

soundcollage is solo project from Istanbul, formed in 2010 playing ambient music. He is effecting loop based sound elements with analog pedals, creating sunken melodies with deep rhythms and playing ‘drone songs’.

ozcanertek

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