Elif Duran writes music for documentaries about buildings nobody lives in. We met her in an unheated textile mill outside Bursa, where she was popping balloons to measure the reverb before writing a single note.
Sixty-two addresses, two diesel generators and a rule about who is allowed to add a room. In Sao Paulo, the parties that outlast the venues are the ones with better logistics.
The two songs after the encore are written on the set list before the doors open. It is four minutes of theatre, and it costs the audience the last train.
Fourteen months, 4,100 euros and one very long argument with a sliding door. What I learned building a working control room into six cubic metres of sheet steel.
Street width, render, tram rails and the local noise floor decide what a city sounds like long before anyone plays a note. A field guide to why Berlin rings for two and a half seconds and Lagos does not ring at all.
Nineteen months, six shopping centres in their last weeks of trading, and a 62 Hz escalator motor doing the job of a bass player. Field recording usually gets away with pointing a microphone at somewhere interesting. This record actually composes.
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