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In Turkey, Music Takes You Where a Travel Visa Can't

We talked with Ozoyo, a Turkish DJ and producer, about the music scene in Istanbul and what it's like to be an artist in a country where political rights and civil liberties aren't guaranteed.

Apr 2 2018, 4:46pm

All photos by Yannick Müller

A version of this article originally appeared on Noisey Germany.

In Turkey, journalists at magazines critical of the government, likeCumhuriyet, are currently being thrown in prison. Authors are under constant surveillance, and since 2017 the number of academics who've been fired from their jobs in the public sector has risen to over 5,000. Under President Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish government has aggressively rescinded political rights and civil liberties, with media freedom sharply declining after a violent political coup in July 2016. According to Freedom House, Turkey's press freedom status is listed as "not free," and the country's current "Freedom in the World" score is 32 out of 100 (zero being the least free, 100 being the most free).

But what's it like to be a musician in Turkey? Noisey spoke with Ozoyo, a DJ and producer in Istanbul, to find out. The 27 year old was born in Turkey, but lived in Germany with his family for eight years during his youth. He's been back in his home country for nearly ten years now, and lives in Istanbul as a musician and student. The music he makes is largely instrumental: Chill beats with hip-hop samples, with a hint of jazz and electronic music throughout this smooth sound. We asked him about the local music scene in Istanbul, what's its like to be an artist in Turkey's political climate, and his plans for the future.

Noisey: How would you describe your sound? Ozoyo: The music I make is pretty laid-back. When I first started my music project as Ozoyo, I was listening to a lot of jazz. And I grew up with hip-hop. But I’m not someone who just gets stuck within one genre—I’m open to new sounds and enjoy getting experimental. The first two EPs were laid-back, but my next project is definitely going to be a little harder in terms of its sound.What sort of influences inspire you?Everything I experience, everything I still want to experience, and everything that’s still waiting to cross my path. Might sound philosophical, but that’s the way I feel. I released my EP Wanderlusttwo years ago. Back then, I just wanted to travel but never had the time. So I decided to produce an EP that tells a story about traveling and the yearning for faraway places. If you take a close look at the track list, you can see what sort of trip I was imagining for myself.

From the protests in Gezi Park in 2013 to the attempted political coup in July 2016, all the way to the current imprisonment of artists and journalists who are critical of the government: The political landscape of Turkey has changed significantly in recent years. What is your impression of the current political climate in the country? The protests didn’t go unnoticed by me. At the Gezi protests in 2013, people initially gathered together to peacefully prevent the trees there from being cut down. Of course there were then groups who acted in a questionable way. But overall, it was about solidarity with a positive underlying idea: the preservation of something old, of the green spaces in the heart of the city in opposition to the construction of another large shopping center. It’s tragic that people wound up dying in the end.

To what degree have the living conditions in Istanbul changed for you? My life hasn’t changed drastically, but you can see that the prices have risen rapidly. Everything is getting more expensive. The minimum wage is 1,400 Lira (roughly $350 USD) a month, and a beer in a typical bar costs about 15 Lira (close to $4 USD). Of course alcohol isn’t good for your health, but having fun is a privilege for the rich here. Even traveling has become difficult and expensive. First you need to get a passport, then you have to pay to get a visa, and on top of that you have a catastrophic currency exchange rate. For one dollar you’ve got to toss out nearly 4 Lira. That doesn’t leave much room for luxuries like vacation. But luckily, music allows me to travel in a different way. For a majority of the population that just isn’t possible, which is really too bad.

How have the political changes manifested in your daily life?Not a lot has changed in my personal, day-to-day life. I willingly moved back to Turkey with my family in 2008 after having spent eight years in Germany. But since I've come back, I've noticed that a lot of people are trying to move to Germany, England, or Austria. So I’m often asked why I came back [to Turkey]. I'm currently studying linguistics in Istanbul and I'll probably be done with my studies this year. Only once I’m finished with university will I know where I’ll be living.

What do you miss—any not miss—about Germany? What are the perks in your life in Turkey?Döner kebab tastes way better in Germany than in Turkey. That said, I’m not a big fan of the weather in Germany. But I really need to see more cities in Turkey and in Germany. Only then will I be able to form a solid opinion about both countries. I used to live in the Stuttgart region [in southwest Germany], and now I'm in Istanbul. But it’s difficult for me to make generalizations about people. Everyone grows up differently, here and there.

How would you describe the music scene in Istanbul?Like anywhere else, the scene is split up into different genres. Pop music, of course, sells the best. But there are a lot of people who are into less popular music. Thanks to Spotify, musicians here can show the world what they’re capable of. In terms of Istanbul specifically, I’m tight with all the hip-hop people, but also with the electronic community. I also prefer people who aren’t just all about partying, but who have a deep interest in music.

How easy is it to network with others in Istanbul?Just like anywhere else in the world, it’s easy to connect with other people through the internet. Through SoundCloud, Facebook, or Instagram, it’s easy to contact others and make connections that way. There’s a large community for electronic music here, but sadly most of them have gotten stuck in cliché genres like house and techno. That doesn’t mean I don’t like house or techno—on the contrary. I’d just find it better if others would be more open to different styles of electronic music. But still, there are small groups of people that are interested in subgenres of electro and other sounds.

So then is there anywhere you’re even be able to perform your music?I’ve been getting booked for shows, yeah. Here in Istanbul I sometimes perform live and play [DJ sets]. Last year I performed in Berlin, Essen, and Munich, and this summer I’ll likely be performing somewhere in Berlin again.

Where do you like to perform the most? Anywhere there’s music. When I’m in clubs, I play danceable music, from trap to house or techno. Sometimes there are events where I perform jazz or play only instrumental beats. A DJ and producer shouldn’t limit himself to just one genre, but rather be open to all sorts of music and then perform them.

Your sound is awfully smooth. You’ve been working with more hip-hop samples recently and they have a pretty chill vibe. What inspired you to do so?Until now, my music has mirrored the quieter side of Istanbul. But my next project will show the darker sides of the city. My next EP is already finished. This time, there won’t just be simple loops, but also entire songs. I look forward to seeing how people respond to it.

Istanbul is a city of extreme contrasts. Not just because it’s split between Asia and Europe, but also because the districts represent contrasting poles—Fatih is very religious, Beyoglu is very open and liberal. How do you experience the contrasts there? Have the different fronts become hardened? A lot of people came to Istanbul at the end of the 80s to work—people with various backgrounds and sexual orientations. Sometimes living together works quite well, other times not so much. Sometimes a woman will get harassed because she’s wearing a short skirt, and sometimes women who are completely veiled get made fun of by other people. Everywhere you go, people are good and bad at the same time.

What keeps you in Turkey? What is it there that makes a difference for you? My studies, my family, and the amazing weather. Besides, you always find up discovering new and amazing little spots in Istanbul.

What projects are you currently working on? Are you collaborating with musicians from other countries? Because I’ve been living in Istanbul for almost ten years, I can’t just travel anywhere at whim. Before I travel, I have to get a visa, that’s why most collaborations take place via the internet without me having to leave the place where I live. But aside from that, I currently have some collaborations with musicians from Germany and Turkey. I’ll be releasing my new EP in May or June. It’s a mix of trap and lo-fi jazz beats. Other than that, I’m still studying and will get my degree this year. And then hopefully I’ll continue to make music for a long time, travel around the world and get to know new, creative people.

Follow Ozoyo on Spotify,SoundCloud, Facebook, andInstagram.

STREAM OF THE CROP

Stream of the Crop: 5 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

New albums from Kacey Musgraves and Frankie Cosmos top this week's list of essential new albums

ByColin JoyceandAlex Robert Ross

Apr 1 2018, 7:33pm

Every week, the Noisey staff puts together a list of the best and most important albums, mixtapes, and EPs from the week just gone. Sometimes that list includes projects we’ve written about on the site already; sometimes they're just great records that we want everyone to hear but never got the chance to write about. The result is neither comprehensive nor fair. We hope it helps.

Kacey Musgraves: Golden Hour

Inspired by LSD, at ease with the world, in awe of the beauty of everything, Kacey Musgraves finally has her country-pop masterpiece. For all of its carefully worked honesty, debut LP Same Trailer, Different Park only hinted at this sort of songcraft; on the follow-up,Pageant Material, Musgraves wasn't sure where she belonged. Here, on her third LP, she seems to have nothing to prove. There's plenty more to be written about Musgraves's talent and worldview but, for now, just listen to "Butterflies," "Happy & Sad," and "Golden Hour," three of the best pop-country-adjacent love songs of this or any other year. And definitely listen to "Rainbow," a stunner, which makes majesty out of familiar balladry. — Alex Robert Ross

Frankie Cosmos: Vessel

Kline seems content on Vessel to keep putting as much of herself out there as ever. The record consists of 18 songs, recorded like her last two albums with a full band and the producer Hunter Davidsohn, written over the course of a tense and tenuous time in her life. In the two years since her last album Next Thing, she’s ended up with a whole new band around her. Her long term relationship with Frankie Cosmos’ former drummer Aaron Maine (who also records as Porches) came to an end. She toured endlessly, spending eight to nine months out of each year on the road, with rarely more than two weeks at home. These things aren’t all in the songs literally, butVessel carries the spirit of these trying times, the incredible lows of romantic dissolution and tour burnout channeled through brief, but potent indie pop songs plumbing the depths of her own psyche. — Colin Joyce, Frankie Cosmos Is Alive, Even If It Feels Like Shit

Mary Halvorson: Code Girl

Often, the seemingly spider-limbed avant guitarist Mary Halvorson makes music that feels like its spoken in another language. It’s melodies are abstract, passages fit together in ways that don’t entirely make sense, it just feels deliciously wrong. That’s great sometimes, but her new projectCode Girl is an inclination of her more rock-oriented tendencies, which is nice for the jazz-curious listeners like me who’ve always scrambled for a way into her work. She made a playlist for The Wire suggesting that this new full band effort was inspired, in part, by the relatively straightforward songwriting of people like Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Fiona Apple. There’s comfort in the moments that lean that way, when vocalist Amirtha Kidambi is centered—which provides a nice ballast for the passages where Halvorson stretches out into barely tonal hinterlands. None of it’s easy, but the vibrant bursts of double-jointed playing have context, which only makes them hit harder. — Colin Joyce

mdo: Enamel

Ryan Loecker’s new tape of damp and swirly drones is short—just under 20 minutes—but I’d argue that in a lot of ways that’s the perfect length to get to know an ambient project. Replaying it, you get to untangle it’s deceptively rich contours, conjured here through aqueous pads, twitchy concrete sounds, and other electronics collaged. Like a body of water you splash into over and over again, expecting to find the bottom,Enamel has a hidden depth. And then when it’s over, you can just dive right back in. — Colin Joyce

TRANS FOREVER: OUT OF FLUX WITH THE UNIVERSE

Some of the best hopes for the future of pop live on the internet, issuing compressed-to-hell missives of digitalist bliss and cheery chaos straight to Bandcamp. If you’ve not been keeping up, OUT OF FLUX WITH THE UNIVERSE—a new compilation of trans and nonbinary artists put together by the Toronto musician Girls Rituals—is a great showcase of a few of the best of this overstimulating scene. Tracing underexplored connections between abstract rap (KC Oritz’ “30 Dollar Coat”), acid gabber meltdowns (astrofolk’s “IDFWU [BOOTLEG GABBER MIX],” synthetic emo-ish balladry (Felix Astroblade’s “Demons), and a whole lot of other disparate forms, it’s a perfect document of pop music in the URL era. Katie Dey and osno1, two of my absolute favorites in this whole world of pitch-warped pop artificers, turn in some of their best works, the cosmic orchestra-synth exploration of “Darkness” and the morbid carol “creep 4 your bones,” respectively. On top of all that it’s free. Can’t beat that.

STREAM OF THE CROP

Stream of the Crop: 5 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

STREAM OF THE CROP

Stream of the Crop: 7 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

STREAM OF THE CROP

Stream of the Crop: 8 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

STREAM OF THE CROP

Stream of the Crop: 5 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

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This Bullshit World Was Predicted by Pulp's 'This Is Hardcore'

The Brit-pop icons' sixth album is dark, filthy, and essential for understanding modern life.

Andrea Domanick

Mar 30 2018, 8:50pm

Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

This Is Hardcore is often hailed as the death knell of Britpop, a fiercelyBritish cultural movement marked by working class grit and pop candor. Acts like Oasis, Blur, and Suede arrived to shake off the sad-sack fuzz of shoegaze and the US’s grunge movement, girded by a kind of sardonic cultural pride that aligned nicely with the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour.

Pulp would join those acts to make Britpop’s “Big Four,” but they’d always remain outsiders, in their own way. The band had already been around for 15 years by the time Britpop took hold in 1993, and wouldn’t find success until the following year’s His ‘n’ Hers. Even then, frontman Jarvis Cocker didn’t fit in with the posterboy cool of Damon Albarn and the Gallagher brothers. Pale and lanky, he grew up an introspective misfit in oversized government-issued spectacles. As a teen, he was kidnapped by pedophiles in a van after his mother told him to be more sociable, only to outwit themwith sarcasm. Accordingly, Pulp’s songs—like “Pink Glove,” “Mis-Shapes,” and, of course, the smash working class diatribe “Common People”—always maintained a degree of observational skepticism, less keen on celebrating or winking at being British, than really going in on it. That underdog ethos that would take Pulp all the way to a headlining slot at Glastonbury in 1995.

By 1998, “Cool Britannia” was being shamelessly co-opted by the newly-elected Tony Blair, as the once-hopeful voices of Britain’s working class towns were drowned out by mine closures and New Labour’s champagne socialism. (Blair’s team supposedly tracked down Cocker while on vacation in New York to ask him to support the election campaign, to which Cocker told them to kindly “piss off”; he’d later formally clap back on the underrated Hardcore B-side “Cocaine Socialism.”)

Britpop was now the stuff of tabloid fodder, a bonafide pop craze distorted into a prefab Spice World, with the baton of dissent yielded to the more palatably cynical hands of Radiohead. Blur ditched the movement the year prior to go full Pavement on its self-titled album, and Oasis had become a caricature of itself. Cocker, for his part, was courting it-girl Chloe Sevigny and a coke habit, his now-spectacle-less pout adorning magazine covers and bedroom walls. A rock 'n' roll sex symbol at last, just in time to be neutered by the inane whimpering of Coldplay and Travis. The sanguine momentum of the impending millennium Pulp heralded on hits like “Disco 2000”—the momentum that got Cocker to where he was—had come to a screeching halt.

Then Pulp threw the gauntlet ofThis Is Hardcore, an unsparing send-off and hangover for the day after the revolution—or was it all just a fashionable party? The group’s sixth album was immediately met with controversy. Its cover, by artists Peter Saville and John Currin, features an uncanny valley portrait of a Hollywood blonde, her nude torso bent over red satin sheets. Her elongated neck arcs unsettlingly towards her open mouth and detached eyes, the album’s hot pink title stamped obscenely across her skin.

“This is Sexist,” would read the graffiti scrawled over Hardcorepromo posters in London’s Underground, along with “This is Demeaning” and “This Offends Women.”

It’s hard to say whether the subway vandals missed Pulp’s point, or helped make it. This is Hardcoresaw Britpop’s working class heroes reckoning with fame, hedonism, success, money, and the grotesque distortion of reality that come with them. It’s not their best album, nor their most popular—even die-hards tend to skip around to the singles—but that’s also what makes it an artistic achievement that still resonates, perhaps more than ever, beyond the decaying “Cool Britannia” from which it was born.

Perhaps more unsettling than the cover art was the music. Gone were the disco-drunk anthems for misfits, the suburban nostalgia, the major synth momentum, and sexed-up class critiques that propelled the long-toiling Sheffield quintet to stardom on their previous two albums, His ‘n’ Hersand 1995’s landmark Different Class. In their place was something darker, something off, rife with porny brass and hollow lounge ballads, bleak sex and claustrophobic mortality. The first note of opener “The Fear” suggests, for a moment, the rising momentum of past hits like “Lip Gloss” and “Do You Remember the First Time,” but quickly reveals itself to be quite the opposite with a minor sustain collapsing to a diminished. The whole thing feels rotten, like a bad cover version of itself.

“This is the sound of someone losing the plot / Making out they’re OK when they are not,” Cocker sings over a creaking, horror movie guitar. If the song’s title hadn’t make it clear, the track is an ode to coked-out paranoia that doubles as the mise-en-scène for the existential vertigo of the songs to follow. The chorus arrives with a choir—screeching, hyperbolic, almost intolerable to listen to—a musical device associated with the ethereal and uplifting, twisted into something disturbing and overwrought.

These unsettling tweaks to Pulp’s signature disco pop are subtle—synth breaks that are a little too emphatic, horns that are a little too processed—but, in tandem with Cocker’s lyrics, underscore how the trusted and familiar can easily, and insidiously, turn foul without us really realizing it. None of it feels particularly intentional, or like the band is trying to make a statement. It’s Cocker and Pulp, off the cuff, the only way they know how to be.

After a career spent pulling back the curtain on the lives and worlds around him, Cocker here turns inward. Hardcore isn’t storytelling, but self-reflection. He sheds the dark horse self-loathing worn as proud armor on albums past, along with the ill-fitting skin of celebrity. There’s no ego or self-pity to it; actually, it’s often funny (“I am not Jesus, though I have the same initials”), a tool not to be undervalued given the album’s tough-to-swallow themes. Most often, though, it’s a frank reckoning with moral complexity, and how the hell we got here. Cocker may be famous, but in turning his incisive lens on himself, he holds a mirror to his audience.

Subsequent songs see him grappling with his father’s abandonment (“A Little Soul”), aging and marginalization (“Help the Aged”), social expectation (“I’m a Man”), and—what else would a Pulp record be?—sex, and its myriad implications, on the title track. Cocker trades the deviant, salacious appetite of past songs like “Pencil Skirt” and “I Spy” for something more clinical, likening success to the life of a porn star. It’s sex as rote dog-car chase (“That goes in there / And that goes in there, oooh / And then it's over”), sex as power (“This is me on top of you / And I can't believe that it took me this long”), sex as inevitable concession of modern life (“You can't be a spectator, oh no / You got to take these dreams and make them whole”). He cleaves at mystique and the seduction of that which is just out of reach, until we are left with nothing but ourselves, naked and alone.

The whole of Hardcore, in that way, plays like the unflinching anticlimax to Different Class; the amorous whimsy of “Something Changed” becomes the predictable relationship failure of “TV Movie”; the psychedelic youth of “Sorted for Es and Wizz” become the desperate, aging hedonists of “Party Hard”; the potential of “Disco 2000” becomes the mundanity and impotence of “Dishes.”

“I'd like to make this water wine, but it's impossible / I've got to get these dishes dry,” Cocker sings. Well, that’s life, isn’t it? “And aren't you happy just to be alive? / Anything's possible,” he belts in the next verse, his voice cracking and slightly off key, as if singing it bigger will somehow make it more true. Or maybe it’s a little too true. If we’re alive, none of us—and especially Cocker—really can complain, but that doesn’t make us feel any less empty. It’s a masterful reckoning of a familiar paradox that most of us would prefer not to parse, and makes for one of the most heartbreaking moments of the album.

Hardcore did well, hitting number one in the UK, but Pulp and its fair-weather fanbase were never really the same again. It’s a difficult album, and to an extent, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to hear their champions of the common people lamenting partying hard and getting older. But that’s not because, as with everyone from Elvis to Taylor Swift, its subject matter comes across as self-indulgent and unrelatable, but rather because it’s so relatable.Hardcore offers a brutally honest look at humanity’s dark side, the myth of meritocracy, and the fallacies and concessions we make to keep up with the competition in modern life. Today we lionize Radiohead for capturing that us vs. them disillusionment on OK Computer, but it’s Hardcore that offers the harder, more unflinching truth: We became them.

The reality of common people, overlooked by Cocker on the song version, is that we all settle, in one way or another. Hardcore is the OK Computer for those of us who chose to indulge and participate. And, if we’re honest, that’s everyone. We all choose pleasure if we can. We’d all be rich if we could. Thom Yorke DJs fashion week parties, but you won’t hear him reconciling with that on the next disaffected Radiohead joint. He’d likely argue, rightfully, that there are bigger, more corrupt fish to fry.

But that’s why it’s all the more important to have a band like Pulp, and an album like This Is Hardcore, there to connect the uncomfortable dots between The Everyman and The Man. Cocker looked around and saw the individualism he eulogized cannibalize the collective action and social conscience it was supposed to give rise to. It’s not hard to see the parallels today—the fleeting pop momentum of “Common People” in the momentary self-satisfaction of hashtag activism; the smug, Yorke-ian satisfaction that these issues aren’t your fault. The takeaway from Hardcore, and its story, is that change—real change—requires taking ownership of some sense of moral complexity and complicity. It’s a tough pill to swallow. Belying the perpetual culture shock of post-2016 life is the more difficult, personal truth that our good intentions don’t mean shit. This Is Hardcore is here to remind us of that—not a crisis of faith, but a shrug of, “I guess we had this coming.”

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