A Walk Through the Bazaar With Erdem Helvacıoğlu

I recently received an e-mail from Turkish composer Erdem Helvacıoğlu concerning his new album, and so went to his MySpace page to see if I could find some samples. What I did find was an excerpt from A Walk Through The Bazaar. Released in 2003 as part of Locust Music’s “Met Life” series, which had musicians create compositions based around recordings of events taking place in their city, A Walk Through The Bazaar certainly captures the hustle and bustle that one imagines always going on in such a place. (You can also listen to an MP3 sample on his website.)

The noise of the crowds, the sing-song voices of merchants hawking their goods and wares, the sounds of countless goods and produce exchanging hands — Helvacıoğlu records it all, and then augments it with his characteristic flourishes. Layers of guitar drone and fuzz wash over the field recordings like heat mirages. The recordings are digitally processed, the conversion to ones and zeroes rendering the “music” both more distinct and more obscured at the same time. String-like passages arise, giving the piece a curiously elegant — and elegiac — tone. And a muffled beat appears beneath it all, like the heartbeat of the city, conveying the urgency, passion, and activity of the place.

The result is not unlike O’Rang’s take on “world” music: a more evocative and interesting take on the genre than most of what you’ll find marked as such in your local record store. It’s less an accurate audio document of the place, and more an evocation and memory of it — conveying less of what it’s like to be in a Turkish bazaar, and more what it’s like to have been there, and look back on it as through old photos and old memories. Which, in some ways, makes it even clearer and more cognizant.