In June 2022 I was invited to compose music for a dance piece that would be performed only for a very limited time within the exhibition “Memento Istanbul: Hristoff Family Archive”, based on the photos, paintings, personal belongings that a three-generation artist family has collected over the years.

Melih Kıraç, Leyla Postalcıoğlu and Mihran Tomasyan, the creators and performers of the piece, are good friends of mine and more importantly their method and work have been inspiring me for a very long time. It’s always a pleasure to be able to work and create with them so I was in again attending their rehearsals at night times, the only possible time zone for creating in the field because in day times the exhibition was open for public audiences.

Observing my friends interacting and communicating with the objects in the archive, exploring the way they moved around the exhibition took me to another time in my life, it was like a time warp. All of a sudden I found myself going through my very personal sound archive, cutting up slices of music I had done when I was young, re-remembering textures and scents, each night after the rehearsal I walked the Istiklal Street in the humid June nights, it was something I had not been doing for such a long time: I imagined Debussy was walking the same streets with a micro cassette recorder in his pocket, repercussions of my stereo love, my grandmother with the “akide” she brought each time she came to our house. Clicks and cuts, resonators, stridulations, paulstretch, coming across the sculpture “Akdeniz” again yet it was moved somewhere else.

All those yesterdays and all those paper planes, this was exactly like coming back to a city that you were born to. I decided there was no need for reverbs digitally, because the reverb of the building was there, it carried all the memory in the air. All my time passes trying to smell you out of thin air and then the present will dominate the past.

This recording is two things: A celebration for the 20th year anniversary of the beautiful dance company “Çıplak Ayaklar” and a birthday present to my 41st year on the planet. So dance.