I will be bringing two bands of mine to Istanbul in May. Pep Talk, our experimental pop improvisation duo with extraordinary singer-composer Ayşe Cansu Tanrıkulu, and the electronic music quartet Böseblick with Alessandra Eramo, Kirsten Reese and Ariel Orah will play at Istanbul’s gem of a music venue Borusan Music House on May 3, 2024.

Pep Talk combines poetry, mainly from Charles Lindsay’s wonderful book Recipes for the Mind on Terranova Press, strange lyrics, beats and other elements from pop music with improvisation and composition. Cansu and I have been collaborating on several fronts since 2017 including theater music for the play Krampus at Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin (2021) and several improvised music concerts (video of our XJazz Festival pandemic concert below). This concert will be the debut concert by Pep Talk.

Böseblick is an experimental electro-acoustic quartet comprising of me and Kirsten Reese on laptop, Alessandra Eramo on voice, cassette players and effects, and Ariel Orah on electronics. It was founded right after a concert at Sowieso in August 2021 and has since played at KM28 Berlin, Klub Katarakt Festival Hamburg, Berlin School of Sound and Cashmere Radio. An excerpt from our KM28 concert cann be viewed below.

Borusan Music House has been a major supporter of “strange music” in Istanbul for over a decade and they have been very generous to me over the years. Including two concerts I played in Berlin that was co-organized by them, I will have played 13 concerts there since 2011.