Silentio by Emin Gök

Artist: Emin Gök
Album: Silentio
Format: Digital / Tape
Cat.No: CHI045
Master: Jesse Skeens
Artwork: Cem Altınöz with special thanks to Ceren Beker
Release Date: 15th June 2023

Turkish experimental musician Emin Gök is releasing his first album on Chinabot. Silentio is a moving exploration of the encompassing, but intangible, nature of love in its many forms, and its own unique expression in Turkish musical tradition. Moving through Anatolian noise, abstract electronics, folk, experimentalism and field recordings, Silentio creates a surreal dreamscape of a deeply intimate personal and cultural heartland.

The scene is set by opening track Mima, a textural combination of ambient electronics and field recordings, with flashes of Turkish strings, through which an uncanny tension grows. On the track In Circles, he is joined by Ramiz Ali, whose saxophone winds like smoke though Gök’s rhythmic, hypnotic dirge. Ode to a Belly Dancer turns the traditional energetic belly dancing track upside down, driven by seething, bubbling textures and syncopated rhythms into an anxious frenzy.

The dreamlike synchronicity felt in the album extends to its creation. Gök had just ended a relationship and was in “complete, wholesome anguish… composed of absence; hence Silentio/Silence,” he explains. Then, in a dream, he saw a baglama, a traditional Turkish and Middle Eastern lute, burning in the woods. He’d been using the instrument after this breakup to provide the basis for what would later become “Silentio,” with the baglama often distorted in production as if it was burning.

“The image had a certain viral effect on me,” he says. “It multiplied and grew.” He decided to ceremonially burn his own baglama in the woods with two friends, one of whom took the photo seen on the album’s cover. “It was a joyful, blissful and even exhilarating experience,” he says.

A couple of months later, working as an assistant sound engineer with a documentary crew, he found himself travelling to Eastern Anatolia in order to meet traditional baglama practitioners who belong to a school of mystical Islamic tradition called Alevism.. “At Alevi villages playing baglama or being a virtuoso is not simply a manner of skill but also a path: music, art, worship, ritual, they are not different things but they together can be seen as one unified action for the constitution of a good life; a wholesome one that is worth living,” Emin explains.

In this cultural practice, he found echoes of his own experience contemplating love through the baglama, but one that begged him to see his experience through a collective, universal lens. “There is usually a particular name attached to the individual names of these Alevi musicians and public figures: Aşık, meaning “the one in love” he says. “This ‘Love’ for them, first and foremost, is the love of god that is manifested through the creations of god.”

“The baglama, thus burns for the anguish of the lost love and lost opportunity but also burns for every other kind of anguish everywhere else, be it imposed by state or nature or oneself or the other,” Gok says. “The baglama, by being burned, becomes fire and like every fire, it has the capacity to destroy if you don’t handle it well, even extending to catastrophic scales. If handled well with care and expertise and patience, it can also be an essential source of warmth, a place where we gather around in circles, feed each other, share and tell stories. This is the story I am telling.”

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