{"title":"Isik Kural","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"in-february","title":"In February","description":"\u003cp\u003eIsik Kural works like a photographer of sound, documenting the passing and returning of time as if material snapshots of life’s temporality. Across the album’s twelve songs, each composed from chance loops and cocooned within the soft container of Isik’s memorable voice and melody play, time is held on to hopefully, impossibly, eternally. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBorn in Istanbul, Isik studied music engineering at the University of Miami, alighted in New York City, and eventually settled in Glasgow, immersing in a sound design masters and audiovisual practice. While these paths guided him between different projects and cities, a voice was simultaneously growing inside the artist, informed by a vision of the world in its everyday luminosity. This voice was expressed in the lyrical and instrumental waves of 2019's As Flurries, a cassette collection for Italian label Almost Halloween Records. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was during a brief trip home to Istanbul in 2019 that the invisible details of in february were first exposed. While assisting on a session at his old haunt Babajim Recording Studios, Isik happened upon a beautiful piano, the kind “in which you hear a melody with the touch of a single note.” A looped segment from a recording of improvised tinkering on the instrument formed the basis “pillow of a thought,” which christens Isik’s new album. A bed for a passing notion, image, moment. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAdopting this novel way of working, Isik produced another twelve passages made from loops of unexpected recordings, nothing over three minutes. Eschewing both compositional plans and live performance proclivities, which had informed previous creative explorations, Isik sought a more instantaneous effect. Minute nylon string refrains, lilting synthesizer hums, and a scrap of a chamber recital are collaged with sympathetic verse and synesthetic details captured around Glasgow and activated at Green Door Studios. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLiterary images also accompany the sensory of in february, weaving wanderlust symbolism through these spiraling studio and field documents. At the center of the album, “lo si aspetta” and “che si aspetta,” are titled after a telling line from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Long Road of Sand. Other word works are yoked to this promise. A verse by Turkish poet Gulten Akin, which connects the weather to lost friendship, meets a translation of Sophokles by Anne Carson in “yeniden,” one of three collaborations with vocalist Stephanie Roxanne Ward, pka spefy, on in February. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIsik treads lightly between the streams of poetry, sound and photography across in february, together impressing an imagistic lightness and immediacy. Although quick as the blink of a camera’s eye or the brush of two hands in passing, the brevity of these works should not be taken for granted: they whisper into each other with elaborate detail, intuitively papered over old and new stories of love and longing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rvng Intl","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50424976146763,"sku":"1142571","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Pink | LP","offer_id":50424976703819,"sku":"1142572","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50424975720779,"sku":"1142568","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/20693673-b874-427b-a709-63f788089941_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726785006"},{"product_id":"moon-in-gemini","title":"Moon in Gemini","description":"\u003cp\u003eIsik Kural returns with \u003ci\u003eMoon in Gemini\u003c\/i\u003e, a luminous scrapbook of slow-flowing narratives couched inintuitive and symbolic storytelling. Bending a playful take on environmental music to the folk song form, Isik’s vocals coo atop pastoral field notes, airy chamber instrumentation and archival recordings culled from a curious musical life. A tender pastiche coalesces across the suite of Moon in Gemini’s fourteen pieces, and Isik invites the listener to daydream as-deep-as-possible.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The songs on \u003ci\u003eMoon in Gemini\u003c\/i\u003e don’t mind being slower or taking their time to reach the listener,” says Isik, who wanted the title to speak to the album’s dreamy, liminal nature. “I enjoyed how the phrase could be used to describe an object, a time or a place simultaneously,” he explains. Similarly and subsequently, these songs contain a multiplicity of sonic artifacts, moments and spaces that span Isik’s rich musical career to date. With the bulk of the album realized between Amasya, Turkey and Isik’s current home in Glasgow, in both domestic and studio recording environments, additional tracks unearthed from his personal recording archive lend their lush patina. The record emerged as a fertile space to reimagine a handful of previously unreleased songs and unfinished ideas spanning the past fifteen years of his life and work, including streetside sounds documented while growing up in Turkey and recordings made while studying music engineering in Miami, Helsinki and Glasgow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInspired in part by listening to iconic, if not sometimes misunderstood, singers such as Nina Simone, Aldous Harding and Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear, Isik aimed to carve out a new space for his voice on\u003ci\u003e Moon in Gemini\u003c\/i\u003e, experimenting with novel recording and mixing techniques. Captured at his aunt’s farmhouse in Amasya during an extended three week recording session, we find Isik’s vocal high in the mix, front-and-center and on newly expressive terms.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMoon in Gemini\u003c\/i\u003e, brimming with natural imagery and lullaby-inflected tones, tunes into states of being where the wonder filled sound of everyday is heard and felt, perfectly imperfect in its poetry; where the invisible steps forward; where dauntless ghosts wait around every corner and play enriches the soul; where bird song fills sun-soaked afternoons and carries us on its wings into each enchanted evening.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rvng Intl","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50531608265035,"sku":"2207741","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Moon_in_Gemini_2bf1a24d_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1728110409"},{"product_id":"motorcycles-and-cherry-wind","title":"Motorcycles and Cherry Wind","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIsik Kural’s\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003eMotorcycles and Cherry Wind\u003c\/i\u003e feels like a sonic travelogue, shaped by memory, movement, and old stories that refuse to fade. Warm, textural, and quietly transportive, it carries the dusty mystery of ancient sites, folklore, and secondhand nostalgia into something intimate and alive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBorn in Turkey, \u003cb\u003eIsik Kural\u003c\/b\u003e began with nylon-string guitar and found-language lyrics before studying music at the University of Miami. Travels through Helsinki, Marrakech, Istanbul, Lycia, Bridge of Allan, and Glasgow feed these songs, with field recordings, piano, guitar, woodwind, and scored arrangements folding into rich, atmospheric detail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eNine musicians appear across the record: \u003cb\u003eGabriel Bastos\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eNoelia Diaz\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eGiulia C\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eSasko Temelkoski\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eTeresa Castanon\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eHannah Gobbett\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eNiki Yaghmaee\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eEzgi Daloglu\u003c\/b\u003e, and \u003cb\u003eLoris S. Sarid\u003c\/b\u003e. Their shared geographies converge in Glasgow, where \u003cb\u003eKural\u003c\/b\u003e turns inherited sounds and fleeting impressions into a single, living artifact.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rvng Intl","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":58072823890251,"sku":"R0220-4149","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2000x2000bb_90a2fc3f-dc16-47e8-958c-e46889d6147c.jpg?v=1786138133"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/isik-kural.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}