Vakant – Tolga Fidan

Gaijin
Drunk Rotations
Alright (whatpeopleplay excklusive)

Tolga Fidan, in his last tasty impartment on Vakant before his solo debut album due out in October of this year, brings 2 full sides of the most expansive mind and body moving you will find outside of a gypsy circle on Jupiter.

If techno has a jazz fusion subgenre, A-side ‘Gaijin’ is it, making Tolga our own personal Chick Corea with a strobe light. With the prerequisite thickness and authority we have come to take for granted from the Vakant camp, ‘Gaijin’ goes to space while sporting an afro and 15 piece avant-garde jazz band. 15 minutes later you remember the trip but have no idea where you’ve landed.

B-side ‘Drunk Rotations’ loses a few members of the band due to cosmic radiation. Remaining members cut their parts into smaller morsels while Chick aka Tolga applies the icing by way of piano. Then the stowaway horn section appears. Where did the modular synth fit, and who brought the Theremin? These are questions for the Mystics. Yet in all the detail of ‘Drunk Rotations’ you never lose the jack or your place on the cosmic dance floor.

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Tolga Fidan – So Long Paris

Urban nomad Tolga Fidan continues Vakant’s limited series VALT with a much sought-after track which has been around for a while. Fidan, just moved to Berlin a few weeks ago, says ‘So Long Paris’ in such unique style that that we hope he’ll never leave Berlin again.

Vakant’s VALT series has been kicked off last year with Onur Özer and keeps on delivering music straight for the dancefloor.

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Vakant youngblood experimentalist Tolga Fidan has teamed up with fellow Parisian melting pot resident Anthony Collins to bring us a double A-side EP of corpulent proportions. Despite different backgrounds, ethnicities, and migratory patterns, the two seem perfectly synched up. Coming out of the sessions the two had while Tolga co-produced Anthony’s upcoming album on Freak n’ Chic, this EP snuggles with both live musician’s and studio nerd’s girlfriends; all parts were played and\or synthesized live.

‘Violente’ is up first, starting off as a thick bopping drum do. It evokes Max Roach hanging out with Larry Levan in modern day Berlin clubland, obi-wan hologram style, presiding over us. Pianos and strings finish things off buttery smooth.

‘La Cadence’ thumps it out in all the ways that feel good. Good like doughnuts, jazz, bikinis, Latin percussion, and stars. Fidan and Collins bring it all together complete with live and personal interludes. Its music you can play at the club or at home for grandma. She’ll dance too, courtesy of your freaky friends at Vakant.

Indubitably talented Tolga Fidan returns for his 3rd EP on Berlin’s fulcrum of funkified tomfoolery, Vakant Heavy Industries. Zee young Frenchman by way of first Istanbul and then London has again taken his varied past to transgress genre and fused flavors to birth a creation that would make even the Iron Chef shiver with inferiority.

A side and EP namesake ‘All Pleasure is Relief’ takes the now signature Vakant deep-tek chuga-chuga, complete with ultra clean pressing sub bass, and adds percussion and patterns hinting south and east. Live guitar played and recorded by Tolga unravels the grasp the ear had, then just as the dance floor has settled deeply into the track’s moods and grooves, a ghostly Persian vocal enters and the scope of musical expanse is revealed.

B side ‘For Our Fathers’ continues the deep multi ethnic feel of the EP, but a touch faster and with straighter rhythmic underpinnings. Guitar, synths, wails, and even what sounds like a harmonica all add expansive melodic textures, grounded in dance music but freely floating unbound by tradition or convention.

Redefining ‘world music’ somewhere behind the shielding refuge of techno, Tolga Fidan and Vakant have once more extended scenic and artistic frontiers.

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Explainable only by a profuse amount of talent, Tolga Fidan blazed into the collective techno consciousness with his first EP “Now I’m Weak” delivering sophistication and unbelievable production quality from bedroom studio means. Now exactly one year after his debut, our young Parisian presents the double A side ´Venice/Tanbulistan´, his second release for Vakant and the rest of the universe.

Tolga’s sophomore affair brings us the same level of quality and dance floor stimulus while alluding to sounds from the East, perhaps taking a page from label mate Onur Özer’s book. Both ´Venice´ and ´Tanbulistan´ move forward with a thick heave of funky drive, while resisting association with any one genre. Pulling influences from boundless borders the sound collage that is left expands and contracts while always chugging forward. The mood of the tracks morph and evolve many times throughout the release, from dark, to direct, to spacey, to playful, and back again.

If Chalum and Wuher had better taste and a future equivalent to a Funktion One sound system, ´Venice/Tanbulistan´ would be playing at Mos Eisley Cantina instead of Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes.

On the second release from its remix imprint VR, Berlin’s Vakant label comes with the goods, turning out what might be its most far-out release to date – and at the same time, its most punishingly effective. Going head to head, Glasgow’s Alex Smoke and Paris’ Tolga Fidan tackle each other’s tracks, twisting up knotty rhythms and gauzy electro-acoustic sounds into a battered syntax that expresses one thing: move. This is the real freaky-deeky, and the season’s dancefloors will never again be the same.

A-side: Alex Smoke, “Neds (Tolga Fidan Remix)”

Relative newcomer Tolga Fidan outdoes himself in his rework of Alex Smoke’s “Neds,” expanding on the psychedlic sound design of his Now I´m Weak EP and demonstrating a rapidly developing structural and rhythmic sophistication. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t hear a little bit of Luciano in the way Fidan stretches out his slow builds and sudden drops, but this is no imitation. Creeping 8-bit drums and understated Latin percussion lay out unhinged rhythms that stretch towards the horizon, paving the way for oily, snake-charming synth pads, thunderclaps of bass and a mournful clarinet that pipes up only to disappear in a haze. Cycling staccato blasts reference the cell-based minimalism of Philip Glass, repetitive and hypnotic. The whole thing is a perpetual field of tension that grips you tight and refuses to let you go, propelling you towards the edge of the unknown.

B-side: Tolga Fidan, “Ilsa (Alex Smoke Remix)”

Fidan’s is a hard act to follow, but Alex Smoke – known for his releases on Soma and Vakant, where he also appears as Quixote – steps up with a remix of Fidan’s “Ilsa” that’s every bit as adventurous, and no less compromising a crowd-mover. Kicking off with dry, sandpapery percussion – woodblocks, shakers, hissing exhaust pipes – it’s quickly marched forward by a lone flute and high-tuned, whipcracking toms. High-plains drifting, the track takes you along on a cinematic journey that opens up onto exotic vistas and alien melodies – windstorms and whippoorwills, dust devils and dry riverbeds. But lest Smoke’s poetic inclinations get the best of him, he drops a squiggly acid bassline to keep the music grounded. By the time it’s all over, Smoke scales back everything but those brittle drums from the introduction; it feels like waking from a fever dream.

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Pop a Dramamine, slap a patch behind your ear, and grab ahold of the railing, because Tolga Fidan’s debut EP “Now I´m Weak” lurches like a dinghy on the high seas. (Might as well throw on a slicker, too, because you’re gonna get wet.) You haven’t heard a synth swell as seasick as the one on “Abstract Prologues” since Motiivi:Tuntematon’s sinking tanker of a track, “1939.” But as woozily as this 12″ rolls, it never loses its grip on the floor: all three tracks are solidly grounded in the blunt, toe-stubbing funk that’s become a trademark of Berlin’s Vakant label, home to mega-talents of minimal like Alex Smoke, Mathias Kaden, Onur Özer, and Robag Wruhme.

Pretty impressive company for the newcomer Fidan, a French multi-instrumentalist who grew up on a steady diet of post-punk-indie, turned on to techno around three years ago, and composed these three tracks on a pair of headphones that cost about the same as two 12″ singles. You’d never know it from the tunes: Fidan’s grasp of dancefloor tactics is as sure as his knack for unhinged effects.

“Abstract Dialogues” kicks off with a vat of churning butter, and a host of creaky, creepy effects that are probably the sound of your arteries hardening: that bass is caloric stuff, indeed. The next seven minutes go exploring a beat that flexes like a bellows, huffing hot air and ashes over the glowing coals. “Ilsa”, with a good ol’ 808 clave and a handclap so crisp you could sell it in the produce section, veers closer to the peak hour, but the fireworks in the upper range are sure to illuminate the path to any afterparty. “Désolé”, meanwhile, sounds a little bit like Isolée in more than name: giving his sawtooths a good detuning, Fidan approximates the woozy qualities of the minimal genius’ classic tracks, roughing them up a bit with rude outbursts of static and reverb. Happily bipolar, the cut leads you two ways at once, via broken subwoofer grumblings, on the one hand, and on the other, gorgeous, almost naïve melodies worn like a faded iron-on on Fidan’s sleeve. Where you’ll find yourself at the end of it all, of course, is up to you.

Tolga Fidan

booking: lola ed

Hailing from Paris via London via Istanbul, don’t call our multi instrumentalist French. Born and raised in Istanbul, studied in London, and relocated to Paris in 2005, Tolga Fidan considers himself Turkish above all else. At just 14, Tolga was playing bass and guitar in post rock bands. Always drawn to experimental music, he was taken with the sounds of Sonic Youth, Autechre, Pansonic, and Austrian experimentalists Fennesz. From this past, Tolga’s musical interest organically morphed into deep techno, signed exclusively with Vakant, and became the label’s youngest-ever artist.

Since breaking into the electronic dance music consciousness with his first ever release ‘Now I’m Weak EP’ on Vakant (VA009) in 2006, he has earned the esteem of fans and techno heavyweights the world over in record time. Perhaps even more freaky, his lush and beautifully produced debut EP was created from the most modest bedroom studio means and mixed on headphones costing less than a round of late night drunken kebabs. Almost instantly this EP got the attention of people like Sven Väth. From there, in 2007 Tolga released ‘Venice / Tanbulistan EP’ (VA014) to critical appeal. Unprecedentedly a track from both his first 2 EPs was licensed to Cocoon for their seventh and eighth season Ibiza mix compilations.

Continuing his exclusive roll on Vakant, Tolga most recently let loose his third installment ‘All Pleasure Is Relief EP’ (VA018), a moving, evolving, and sprawling electronic soundscape. This last work perhaps best illustrates the breadth of Tolga scope incorporating a multi ethnic feel, showcasing his musicality, and redrawing techno boundaries.

Together with Vakant, Tolga Fidan’s bottomless sound, constantly morphing arrangement, and eclectic sound design that somehow points towards the orient have taken him so far in so little time.

www.myspace.com/tolgafidan