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Postcard #2 - Istanbul - Songs for the Homesick
2012
| 1 - Calm | Lyrics | Listen |
|---|---|---|
| 2 - Burn | Lyrics | Listen |
| 3 - Miles | Lyrics | Listen |
| 4 - Way Out | Lyrics | Listen |
In the last few years I have travelled more than ever before in my life. Physically, in terms of seeing foreign countries, walking through wastelands, kissing new friends goodbye in distant airports, as well as mentally, just gathering new experiences and insights.. And sometimes I managed to record those journeys, let some of those moments curdle into sound and song. Those acoustic artefacts of different points in time and space now lie on my desk like postcards that I bought and lettered yet never sent.
Now if I were to travel back in time to those points that were signficant, where would I end up? What's written on those postcards that I'd find now that I forgot about?
I'm not quite sure, but either way it's time to go and send them, one by one, until we have a collection that traces the steps on this journey.
The trip starts on an island in the Baltic, summer 2010, will continue to spring in Turkey, move back home from there.. and end in Berlin as we move from past to present tense. It will contain songs about apocalypse played on water bottles and resonating flintstones, the very first attempts to play a piano, explorations of vocal music, discoveries of new instruments, songs about yearning for departure and songs about return.
You will see, as each month from now until the end of the year, you will receive a bunch of mixed and mastered memories from me.
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Istanbul. The city of cities.
My friends left me in their apartment
in Üsküdar for a few days, alone with a
talking cat and a piano. I‘d feed the cat in
the morning and then play the piano ‚til
noon, having no idea how that instrument
works but enough time to make errors
and more errors until uncontrollable
sounds turn into melodies.
The balcony overlooks the Bosphorus.
I have dinner watching ferries cross from
Asia to Europe and back, hear seagulls
screaming, unaware of continent borders.
Back home, over there, in the West there
are things waiting for me, unresolved
stories, but I keep lingering over here, far
away and out of reach from everything.
Istanbul is the loudest city I know, the
most restless one, crowded, big and dirty
and unbearable, but I love it more fiercely
than any other. I‘ve thrown myself right
into its very core, got lost in the maze of
its streets, talked to people in a language
I don‘t understand. To then come back to
a place I call home for a couple of days,
my ivory tower, with the talking cat and
the piano and cast current desires and
confusions into songs.
These are the first songs I ever made on
that instrument which I still cannot play,
right in that city I cannot shake. Istanbul,
you‘ll have me back. Soon.
Istanbul, June 2011
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