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1
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
Mobile Music
studies
VOLUME
Edited by
SUMANTH GOPINATH
and
JASON STANYEK
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
e Oxford handbook of mobile music studies, volume / edited by
Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek.
v. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN –––– (alk. paper)
. Digital music players—Social aspects. . Portable media players—Social aspects.
. Digital music players. . Music—Social aspects. . Music trade.
I. Gopinath, Sumanth S. II. Stanyek, Jason
ML.O
.—dc
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-freepaper
C
Preface to Volume2 ix
Contributors xiii
. e Mobilization of Performance:An Introduction to the Aesthetics
of Mobile Music
S G J S
Part i Frequency-range aesthetics
. Treble Culture
W M
. Of Sirens Old andNew
A R
Part ii sounding transPort
. “Cars with the Boom”:Music, Automobility, and Hip-Hop
“Sub” Cultures
J A. W
. Ding, Ding!:e Commodity Aesthetic of Ice Cream Truck Music
D T.N
. ere Must Be Some Relation Between Mushrooms and Trains:
Alvin Curran’s Boletus Edulis—Musica Pendolare
BP
Part iii Walking and bodily
choreograPhy
. Creative Sonication of Mobility and Sonic Interaction with Urban
Space:An Ethnographic Case Study of a GPS Sound Walk
F B
vi
CONTENTS
. Soundwalking:Creating Moving Environmental Sound Narratives
A MC
. Gestural Choreographies:Embodied Disciplines and Digital Media
HB
Part iV dance and danceMusics
. (In)Visible Mediators:Urban Mobility, Interface Design, and the
Disappearing Computer in Berlin-Based Laptop Performances
M J.B
. Turning the Tables:Digital Technologies and the Remixing of
DJ Culture
C Z KL
. Dancing Silhouettes:e Mobile Freedom of iPod Commercials
J DB
Part V PoPular Music Production
. Music, Mobility, and Distributed Recording Production in Turkish
Political Music
EB
. Rhythms of Relation:Black Popular Music and Mobile Technologies
A G. W
Part Vi gaMing aesthetics
. A History of Handheld and Mobile Video Game Sound
K C
. e Chiptuning of the World:Game Boys, Imagined Travel, and
Musical Meaning
C T
. Rhythm Heaven:Video Games, Idols, and Other Experiences
of Play
MK
CONTENTS
vii
Part Vii Mobile Music instruMents
. e Mobile Phone Orchestra
G W, GE, H P
. Creative Applications of Interactive Mobile Music
AT
. e World Is Your Stage:Making Music on the iPhone
GW
Index
CHAPTER
Music, Mobility, and
distributed recording
Production in turkish
PoliticalMusic
ELIOTBATES
T music industry of Turkey, symbolically centered in the Unkapanı and Beyoğlu
neighborhoods of Istanbul, has increasingly come to rely on work performed out-
side of Istanbul and oen outside of Turkey. Numerous studios and record labels
in North America and Central and Western Europe cater to Turkish, Kurdish, and
Zazaki-language markets, and they maintain ties with Istanbul in myriad cultural, eco-
nomic, and artistic ways. However, the mobility of musicians is hampered by politi-
cal boundaries, as Turkish citizens face diculties in obtaining overseas travel visas,
and thousands live in political exile in Europe and elsewhere, unable to return to their
homeland.
A cluster of technologies for creating, manipulating, duplicating, and transmitting
digitized audio now enables diverse, geographically distributed sites to be connected
in a veritable transnational production network. Moreover, these technologies have
made distributed production feasible, meaning that musicians who cannot physically be
together are able to simultaneously (although not synchronously) work on albums or
lms. Despite the limits musicians face in physical mobility, their music is mobile, as is
the digital data that they use as a technology of collaboration with other musicians.
In this chapter Ifocus on the creation of Grup Yorum’s twentieth anniversary album,
Yıldızlar Kuşandık, released by the large independent record label Kalan Müzik Yapım
in . An ambitious work, it consumed over ve hundred studio hours, employed
dozens of studio musicians, and featured some arrangements with well over one hun-
dred distinct simultaneous parts. e group, which since its inception in has had
over y core members (called Yorumcular) and many ancillary ones, is one of the
longest-running musical groups in Turkey, and it is famous for its socialist political
ELIOTBATES
activism. Many members have been (and continue to be) jailed for participation in
demonstrations, or for performing or recording songs in the Kurdish language. Other
members have lived in exile in Germany, unable to enter Turkey. Yet, members local
and abroad—those in F-Type prisons and those free—collaborated toward creating this
album.1 Production and collaboration were made possible by a host of mobile technolo-
gies:ash memory MP players brought arrangements and test mixes to those without
studio access, hard drives and DVD-Rs transported digital audio workstation sessions
on a daily basis between studios in Istanbul and Germany, and CD-Rs and ash drives
connected Yorum with their recordlabel.
Two factors come to shape the mechanics of distributed production networks:tech-
nological capacity and the connections between nodes within a network, particularly
the ability for people, objects, and data to ow. As Ishow later in this chapter, distributed
music production as a paradigm became possible due to the conuence of particular dig-
ital technologies, but technological capacity limited the ways in which work could simul-
taneously be done at disparate sites within the production network. It was with great
eort that hard drives moved across the tightly secured border and ash drives were
brought to members in prison, but nevertheless there was a veritable ongoing tracking
of digital data. However, this ow was only possible when people were able to transport
devices between sites. is research, therefore, is a study of the mechanics of the mobility
of music, even when the musicians and consumers may be limited in their mobility.
R D P
e bulk of my research for this project stems from an intensive three-month period
when I interacted with Grup Yorum as one of the tracking and mixing engineers
for their nineteenth studio album, Yıldızlar Kuşandık. ZB Stüdyo, located in the
Galata-Tünel neighborhood of Istanbul, was one of the major sites for recording and
mixing, and Iengineered all the instrumental and vocal recordings that were made at
ZB.2 Ialso performed most of the digital editing for the album and mixed three of the
album’s songs. During the same period, Iwas frequently in phone or internet chat con-
tact with the recording/mixing team based in Germany, as les and arrangement ideas
were frequently shared between the two spaces, and during the mixing phase Iwas in
regular contact with the other two mixing engineers.
Being an “insider” in the project made the research possible while also introducing
a host of potential representational issues. It is likely that Iobserved more of the work
that transpired for the album project than anyone else, including the members of Grup
Yorum themselves. Iwas able to collect a large amount of primary data, observe repeat
interactions, and notice moments that an occasional visitor to the studio would likely
have not been able to see. e content of this study of music and mobility is the culmina-
tion of these eeting moments, as much of the recording transpired in a fashion that,
supercially, resembled other, less “mobile” projects. Iwas concerned at the start of my
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
embedded ethnography project that my own aesthetic preferences as an engineer would
unduly aect the object of my study. However, it became quickly apparent that Yorum
had a clear audible aesthetic in mind, that my purpose was to facilitate this aesthetic,
and that group members and hired studio musicians had no hesitation to intervene if
anything (aesthetic or otherwise) was moving in what they perceived to be the wrong
direction.3 When Iinterviewed Yorum following the album release, group member
İnan Altın indicated that the primary dierence in having me as an engineer (compared
to other engineers) was not aesthetic, but rather the extent of conversation that trans-
pired during work itself, as there was additional need to explain to me what it was they
wanted. Occasional “misunderstandings,” as İnan termed them, may have delayed the
recording process, but in retrospect they were probably essential for my resulting eld
notes, because processes, aesthetics, and issues that would have normally been unvoiced
ended up being openly discussed.
G Y, P M, D
In Turkey, the name Grup Yorum is inextricably linked with political activism. For their
fans, Yorum is a voice of Turkey’s active revolutionary socialist movement.4 Yorum is
the only long-term musical group advocating for prisoners’ rights; singing against war,
imperialism, and foreign aggression; and being willing to publicly protest in the name
of causes they believe in, regardless of potential negative consequences to them as indi-
viduals. Members of Yorum can oen be found at public demonstrations, most notably
anti-war marches, thus resulting in many members of Yorum serving extended terms in
prison or becoming exiled outside Turkey. As many as four hundred lawsuits have been
led against the group (Korpe :). İnan explains the relation of Grup Yorum to
other political organizations:
Grup Yorum’s members emerged in opposition to the September , coup d’état,
silently, but in reaction to September they were the sound of the youth. Besides
their concerts, they helped thousands of university students participate in forums,
meetings, and direct action. It is possible at some Grup Yorum concerts to hear slo-
gans of organizations such as DHKP-C (formerly named Devrimci Sol). However,
Grup Yorum members make it very clear in every interview they give that they are
not members of any illegal organizations. Instead, they oppose imperialist exploita-
tion, occupation, and torture; and state that they exist in order to establish a socialist
country and world from within a democratic struggle. As a means to rid the world of
these [imperialist exploitation and so on], they invite all peoples’ organizations. ey
explain that they have an organization themselves, and are situated within a demo-
cratic struggle.5
For Yorum’s detractors, the group’s championing of Kurdish rights and singing of
Kurdish-language songs is viewed as highly problematic. For some, the very idea of
ELIOTBATES
Kurdish language rights itself amounts to a fundamental assault on the foundations and
values of the Turkish Republic.6 One translation of the word yorum is “commentary,” and
regardless of an individual listener’s sociopolitical orientation the songs Grup Yorum
sing are a substantial commentary on how contemporary Turkish society is polarized
around numerous issues:ethnic rights, socialist and populist ideologies, and Turkey’s
foreign, domestic, and military policy.
Political music has a long and complex history in Anatolia, extending back at least
as far as Pir Sultan Abdal, a prominent Alevi Turcoman musician and poet born in the
eenth century in Sivas. Pir Sultan’s poetry continues to be used in contemporary
songs (including in new compositions by Grup Yorum) and inuences the prosody
of contemporary Turkish-language poets. Other folk poets, including Köroğlu (six-
teenth century) and Dadaloğlu (nineteenth century) wrote critically of the sultan-
ate, later becoming part of a new canon of “anti-divan folk literature” championed by
educators in the nascent Turkish Republic in the early twentieth century (Öztürkmen
:; Holbrook :). e lyrics of Pir Sultan, Köroğlu, Dadaloğlu, and more
contemporary poets such as Aşık Mahzuni Şerif and the exiled Nazim Hikmet share
the bizarre distinction of being ocially recognized as among the most signicant
Turkish-language poetry, while inspiring music that is routinely banned or censored for
having political meanings.
However, the long history of political music has not meant that political music has
always been championed. e September , military coup d’état, for example,
inaugurated a six-year period when political music was eectively silenced, causing for-
merly political groups such as Yeni Türkü to abruptly shi focus to wholly uncontrover-
sial themes (Özer ). Cem Karaca, an Anadolu rock singer who set the oen-political
lyrics of Pir Sultan, Dadaloğlu and other aşık poets to psychedelic rock inuenced
music, lived in exile in Germany until (Stokes a). Grup Yorum was one of the
rst political groups to emerge in Turkey following the coup.
A second category of political music is Kurdish, Zaza, and other Anatolian “ethnic”
music. It is the public prominence and deep contestation of ethnopolitics itself within
the modern nation-state of Turkey, and the prominent role of musical performance in
the expression of ethnicity, that today denes music in Anatolian ethnic languages as
siyasal (political). us, the performance of any song in Kurdish (regardless of lyrical
content) is to an extent political. Language plays a big role in the political perception
of ethnic music, but it is not entirely a linguistic matter. Alevi music has increasingly
become perceived as political as well, yet it is sung in Modern Turkish and many Alevis
could be considered ethnically Turkish.7 e expression of an ethnic identity other than
Turkish is a political act, perceived as such by performers, audiences, and the nation
atlarge.
Not all music that is regarded as siyasal today contains resistance narratives, overt
references to centralized authority, or ethnopolitical leanings. Another form of politi-
cal music sings praises or support of political parties or of great leaders. Âşık Veysel
Şatıroğlu composed “Atatürk’e Ağıt” (lament for Atatürk) shortly aer the death of the
visionary general and founder of the Turkish Republic, which is a song about the great
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
deeds of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as well as the profound loss the nation felt for the pass-
ing of this great leader. Âşık Veysel continued to champion the CHP (Cümhuriyet Halk
Partisi, or Republican People’s Party) at ocial functions, and other musicians since
have been prominently associated with particular political parties (Yılmaz ). e
links between music and governance continue to characterize Turkey’s political land-
scape, as within the past decade several popular singers have become members of par-
liament, including Zülfü Livaneli (CHP), Tolga Çandar (CHP), and İlkay Akkaya—a
former member of Yorum and co-founder of the Yeşiller, or GreensParty.
e music of Grup Yorum is most commonly categorized as protest or özgün (authen-
tic) music by fans and the music industry, referencing a genre of leist political music
that Martin Stokes describes as having “much in common with Anatolian rock” and
features lyrics that are “complex and oen were taken from major leist poets such
as Nazim Hikmet” (b:). Ahmet Kaya (–) is widely regarded as the
founder of this genre. Protest or özgün are political in the rst sense (protest against state
policies) and second (expression of ethnicity other than Turkish), but not in the third
(support of a political party). However, in the same way that Grup Yorum is a largely
self-contained organization and is not aliated with other political associations, they
do not self-describe their music as protest or situate their work in relation to Ahmet
Kaya, instead describing their music as devrimci (revolutionary)music.
Grup Yorum may be best known for their protest songs (particularly their hundreds
of numerous newly composed marches as well as their innovative adaptations of tradi-
tional political folk poetry), but this does not accurately encapsulate their opus. Many
fans attend their shows to dance, and the primary dance at Yorum concerts is the halay,
a line or circle dance found throughout Turkey but particularly important in localities of
Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia. Fans from specic localities usually dance together,
thus one will nd a Sivas sarı kız halayı line next to a Diyarbakır halayı next to a Batman
govend next to circles from dierent localities within the Tunceli Province. For as many
protest songs as they have authored, Yorum has composed an equal number of love
songs, lullabies and works in other song genres. For their twentieth-anniversary album,
from the project’s inception onward it was clear that protest, halay, love songs, and lul-
labies would obligatorily be included.
e lyrics to the most overt protest songs, “Felluce” and “Sıra Neferi,” tell in graphic
terms of the horrors of the second Iraq war and leave no doubt to their specic politi-
cal themes and message. But what of the halay line dances, which are typically done to
instrumental music, or of the love songs or lullabies that Yorum sings? On the popu-
lar social dictionary website Ekşi Sözlük,8 the newly coined term ideolojik halay has
thirty-one entries, ranging from descriptions of halay dancing at Communist gath-
erings at Istanbul University, to suggestions that the meaning of halay in the Eastern
Anatolian (and predominantly Kurdish) city of Diyarbakır is inseparable from its
political-ideological associations. Halay dancing thematically appears in Grup Yorum’s
lyrics themselves. eir most famous composition, “Cemo,” ends with the lyrics “o
büyük günün görkeminde çocuklar halaya duracak” (in the glory of that big day, the
children will line up to dance the halay). is is not to say that dance is always political
ELIOTBATES
or that halay in particular has a singular, prescribed political meaning. However, in
the milieu of Grup Yorum’s concerts and albums, halay dance has come to have a par-
ticular constellation of political meanings inseparable from those of the more overtly
political songs. Yorum’s concerts create a liminal space where the performance of mul-
tiple kinds of identities—local, regional, ethnic, and even religious—is itself a political
act, and halay serves as a galvanizing force of this performance and the multiplicity of
identities.
For the creation of Yıldızlar Kuşandık, the halay concept was important from the
project’s inception:
Halay is denitely one of the things we are thinking about. Halay of course has a
cultural dimension, Imean in Anatolia, this is the music that accompanies people’s
dances, this is a kind of dance music and for hundreds of years this tradition has
existed. Everywhere you go in this land there’s a distinctive dance style, and this halay
concept, for Yorum, is really one and the same. Imean, Yorum also sings heavy songs
and such but always one of the rst things really to come to mind when you think of
Yorum is halay, the halay-s danced at concerts. Hundreds of people, thousands of
people excitedly dancing, Imean this sight has come to be very much synonymous
with Grup Yorum.9
In addition to the century-old associations of halay, traditional line dancing was part of
the overall rhythm of concerts:
A concert generally has a rhythm to it. Certainly it begins with this heavy sit-down
kind of a thing, later we pick up the energy. Imean, standing in place and singing is
accompanied by applause, later [people] begin to get up, halay dancing begins and
later, marches, singing accompanied strictly by sts [waved in the air] begins, they
even march around while stomping with their feet, that increases in intensity quite
abit.10
C “E M”
roughout the period of the state monopoly on broadcasts (–)
political censorship and self-censorship always existed, changing only its
form or framework.
—Yurdatapan (:)
Music entrepreneurs, particularly those who explore emerging and untapped poten-
tial markets (such as Kurdish-language music, the production of which was ocially
banned from –), work in a legal environment characterized by substantial
risk. Access to television and radio continues to be tightly controlled by RTÜK,11 an
agency that answers to the Turkish Ministry of Culture; songs can be banned for any
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
reason, particularly if they contain any kind of political critique or could be perceived
to be morally problematic, a sentiment which shis with each successive ruling govern-
ment.12 Even for “approved” songs the corresponding videos may be banned for simi-
lar reasons. Regional governments also have the capability to ban songs or albums that
were nationally approved. us, labels and artists alike work with the knowledge that
their eorts may be greatly curtailed, and suddenly so, through censorship. Many inde-
pendent labels and artists simply write o the possibility of radio or TV exposure and
utilize other less regulated means to promote their creative work, including overseas
performances.
Although the period in which Iconducted research exhibited perhaps the greatest
extent of artistic freedom ever seen in Turkish recording history, decades of censorship
had resulted in a situation where artists such as Grup Yorum assumed that their work
would be censored.
Some groups and singers, such as Grup Yorum, [Grup] Kızılırmak, Koma Amed,
Koma Denge Jiyane, Koma Asmin, Şivan [Perwer], Ciwan Xeco, Ferhat Tunç, Suavi
and Ahmet Kaya—who died in exile—are automatically non grata for private radio
and TV stations, for they know that the state does not like them. It is almost the same
with the press. Many journals and TV and radio stations belong to just a few bosses.
e editors and programmers know what not to do, so direct censorship is not neces-
sary at all. (Yurdatapan :)
is passage was written by Şanar Yurdatapan, a prolic songwriter and producer who
himself was jailed for performing with the seminal Kurdish pop group Koma Asmin.
To situate two of these artists in the recording industry context, Ahmet Kaya was the
number seven top-selling artist in Turkey in the s, with combined total pressings
of ,, units (Milliyet ). Grup Yorum has likely sold an equivalent number
of units, but there has not been accurate reporting of their sales or manufacturing sta-
tistics.13 ese artists managed to succeed despite their near-complete lack of access to
mainstream magazine, newspaper, TV, and radio exposure.
It is in light of this risk that everyone operates in the Turkish recording industry.
e post- Turkish music industry has experienced “a Catch-”:there is a glut of
poor-selling Turkish-language material on the market, yet it is the Anatolian ethnic
language material (most notably Kurmancı, Lazuri and Zazaki) that appears poised for
nancial growth, as those markets are not yet saturated. e less saturated the market,
the greater the risk, at least from a legal perspective. However, risk is not exclusively
linked with governmental or state concerns. In January , the Turkish government
began Kurdish language broadcast on the state-controlled TV station TRT .Even
though TRT employees receive government paychecks, most use pseudonyms, fear-
ing that they may become the target of assassinations by right-wing nationalist militias.
Additionally, program guest lists and content are controlled, to the extent that famed
Kurdish singer Rojin quit TRT two months aer launching a daily TV show focused
on women’s issues, claiming she was treated as a “criminal” and not allowed to invite
her own guests onto the show (Hürriyet Daily News ). And, despite the technical
ELIOTBATES
legality of broadcasting in Kurdish in , Grup Yorum still cannot be heard on the
radio nor seenonTV.
D P
For this chapter, Idene production to include all work that leads up to the tangible cre-
ation of a cultural product, including studio performances, evaluative stages that lead to
further work, and the approval of work done (but not the marketing of the work, or any
work done aer the completion of the nal duplication master). Aparticular aspect of
the production of this album was the manner in which work transpired simultaneously
at multiple sites. However, Ido not believe that the term “multi-sited production” best
describes this work, as “multi-sited” does not tell us anything about the relation between
dierent sites. Instead, Iterm this manner of work as distributed production, in order to
draw attention to the mechanics of the sharing and the techniques facilitating the move-
ment of work betweensites.
Motivating a study of distributed production is the assumption that cultural produc-
tion no longer happens at a single site. But, if not a single site, on what (or where) exactly
should such a study be focused? Four questions help dene a framework for nding a
focal point and assisting the analysis of distributed production systems. First, what work
is conducted at each site? Second, how do products, production, and cultural producers
move between sites, what constraints exist on the movement, and what is done to over-
come these constraints? ird, what is the temporality of the particular distribution,
and how does the technological capacity limit the kinds of work that can be done simul-
taneously at multiple sites? Fourth, what are the politics of and aecting distribution?
Distributed production analysis is not the rst attempt to understand those cultural
production systems that cannot be adequately studied through single-sited analysis.
Arjun Appadurai’s o-used theory of a multiplicity of “scapes” (Appadurai suggested
the terms mediascape, technoscape, ideoscape, nanscape, and ethnoscape, and simi-
lar constructions were coined by other scholars) has been particularly inuential in
the study of the transnational ows of culture (Appadurai ). While “scapes” turn
attention away from singular, bounded eld sites, they do so without critically investi-
gating the character of or the mechanisms behind the ows themselves. Precisely what
ows, and how does it ow? What processes and systems enable certain ows to happen,
restrict the occurrence of other ows, and thus come to dene the actual mechanism of
the ow that we perceive to be a smooth, undierentiated “scape”? What is the tempo-
rality of the ow? As Iwill show later in this chapter, music and digital data were able to
ow, but those ows still required human agency, and were neither smooth nor undif-
ferentiated, nor was their roughness accurately described as simply a “disjuncture.” It
was not through an undierentiated technoscape or mediascape that distributed pro-
duction happened, but through a specic, strategically created, temporary network of a
multitude of sites with diering kinds and degrees of connection to eachother.
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
T M D
R P
In electronic circuits, computer programs, neurophysiology, and systems design, a
primary distinction is made between two kinds of processes:serial and parallel (see
Figure.). e same distinction can be made in organized production systems of a
social nature, such as audio or video recording. Aserial process is one whereby work
happens sequentially at a series of sites or nodes, and describes the common mode of
multi-sited production in analog and early digital production workows. In a workow
using serial processes, tapes recorded at one studio are transported to another studio
for mixing, and the resulting analog master brought to a third facility for mastering.
However, work does not happen simultaneously on the same tapes at multiple facilities,
but rather sequentially, as it was not technologically feasible to coordinate disparate work
done at multiple sites. An analysis of serial multi-sited production is always focused on a
single site, with a shiing focal point when production moves betweennodes.
With the advent of non-linear digital recording and standardized digital audio work-
station sessions, which became commercially widespread starting in the mid-s and
common in Turkey around , it was possible for identical copies of sessions to exist
at multiple locations, and therefore for project work to be shared between and happen
simultaneously at multiple sites. erefore, it was technologically feasible to implement
parallel processes. However, the ability to easily implement parallel work on an album of
the scope of Yıldızlar Kuşandık, where some songs exceeded one hundred simultaneous
parts, did not exist until roughly . Hard drive and optical media capacities were too
low, storage interfaces did not allow sucient throughput to run a session o of a single
hard drive, and digital audio workstations had limited track counts.14 Immediately aer
the technology became available it remained infrequently used, as seasoned engineers
Serial process:
Parallel process:
1
1
2
35
4
23
45
FIGURE
. Serial and parallel processes
ELIOTBATES
were more experienced and comfortable with serial processes. However, in the early
s it has become more commonplace, sometimes for economic reasons (the bulk of
the work can be done at home studios, which incur no hourly use fee, and later integrated
with work done at professional facilities), sometimes for creative reasons,15 and some-
times (as in this case study) for personal and political reasons. Whatever the reasons,
the ease of implementing serial and parallel processing is a technological requirement
and precursor to distributed album production. e nature of digital audio worksta-
tion sessions—portable, copyable, archivable, innitely expandable, and extendable—
encourages the moving and sharing of production betweensites.
For distributed production and parallel processing to take place, the strategic use of
numerous technologies is imperative. In some cases, this necessitates a rethinking of
what the particular technology actually is, what kinds of work technologies enable, and
the mechanics of how they enable particular kinds of work. For example, a technical
denition of a hard drive might focus on certain physical characteristics (its solid exte-
rior protects an interior lled with delicate moving parts; it interfaces to computers via
a serial buss, stores X gigabytes of digital data, and allows random write and read-access
to data). Hard drives are normally invisible, residing inside a single computer, and due
to the integrated appearance of computers and the graphical interface of operating sys-
tems are rarely perceived as a discrete entity that warrants attention (unless they stop
working or are full, at which point they become visible due to their deciencies). But
what happens when the very same hard drive is covertly transported across national
boundaries, repeatedly, by those few individuals free enough to be legally allowed to
make the trip itself? What happens when this same hard drive contains several albums’
worth of music, storing not only the rough mixes of songs, but also a record of the entire
compositional process itself, and the capability of generating new arrangements and
versions of those album songs? How does our perception of hard driveness change when
we learn that the actual path that the physical hard drive takes is one that many of the
band’s members could nevertake?
My questions point to the precariousness of the ow itself between sites. Idraw par-
ticular attention to the transport of physical devices, as the primary ow of digital media
for this project occurred through physical means rather than through internet-assisted
le transfer. It is important to consider the state of internet access in Turkey at the time
of this album project. Although ADSL internet was available, it was expensive and much
slower than European or American internet connectivity, particularly in transferring
data in and out of Turkey.16 e sheer amount of data in a multitrack album project,
coupled with slow internet speeds, meant that DAW sessions could not be readily shared
via PP, FTP, or other le transfer protocols. MP test mixes were small enough to be
emailed or uploaded, but many sites within the production network in question (mem-
bers in prison, for example) were not connected to the internet, therefore requiring the
transport of devices which stored digital audio. erefore, the mobility of music, at least
for this particular project, depended upon physical objects and human travel.
Technological limitations curtail the kinds of simultaneity that can be implemented
within parallel processes. For example, it was neither possible for musicians to perform
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
“together” in real-time, nor for individuals to fully participate, remotely, in real-time
mixing or editing work happening at a dierent studio. Ostensibly, with dierent
technological capabilities in place (video conferencing, or remote access that allowed
real-time synchronization between computers over a network connection), other kinds
of simultaneity could be achieved and impact the nature of how distributed, parallel
production is undertaken and managed.
C S:Yıldızlar Kuşandık
For their twentieth anniversary album, Grup Yorum wished to create their most elab-
orate, orchestrated, and dynamic album to date. Well before any recording began,
the group had agreed on song themes, general musical aesthetic ideas, and a plan for
approaching the task of arrangement. Music for the album was composed by a geograph-
ically dispersed network of lyricists and songwriters, several of whom were, at the time
the album was created, in Turkish prisons for political charges or in exile in Europe. Two
de facto project arrangers—İnan Altın in Istanbul, and Ufuk Lüker in Köln, Germany—
managed the recording and arrangement process, and group and studio musician per-
formances were recorded at three professional studios (ZB and Sistem in Istanbul and
Per Sound in Köln), mixed at three studios, and nally mastered by Michael Schwabe at
Monoposto, a mastering facility in Düsseldorf, Germany. Up until the mastering stage,
music charts, lyrics, mixes (on CD-R, ash drive, and MP player), session les (on hard
disk and DVD-R), and ideas were continuously moving between spaces.
e arrangements realized in Istanbul and Germany rst manifested as a set of four
to twelve MIDI plot tracks outlining the most important melodies, chordal sequences,
and rhythmic layers. Yorum created these on basic home computers with Cubase so-
ware and, in Istanbul, with the help of İnan’s Roland Fantom LE keyboard workstation
synthesizer. e MIDI plot tracks for these arrangements contained only the informa-
tion one might nd on a simple musical score—note durations, pitches, and dynamics
values. Unlike a musical score, MIDI data can trigger sounds in synthesizers or samplers
and thus make audible the musical information through a variety of timbres. However,
MIDI data is useless without either a computer or a hardware sequencer that can parse
the data. MIDI data is portable, but its creation and audition both require bulky and
relatively expensive hardware.
Following a several-month rehearsal process at İdil Kültür Merkezi,17 Grup Yorum
brought their MIDI parts to Stüdyo Sistem in Istanbul in order to track percussion
parts (played by İnan and by studio musician Ömer Avcı, and recorded by Hasan
Karakılıç), bağlama and cura (the ubiquitous long-necked Anatolian lutes with mov-
able frets), acoustic guitar, and silver ute. Yorum also hired the famous studio drum-
mer Turgut Alp Bekoğlu, electric bassist Emrah Günaydın, and guitarist Gürsoy Tanç to
record foundational drum rhythms, bass lines and electric guitar textures for seventeen
songs during a two day recording marathon. e result of this was a Cubase session le
ELIOTBATES
containing WAV format audio les, along with the MIDI plot parts. All of the audio,
MIDI, and session les were copied onto two hard drives, one which went to Per Sound/
Köln and the other which was brought to ZB Stüdyo/ Istanbul, where the remainder of
work was done in the Protools HD platform.
One of the rst complications we encountered at ZB Stüdyo was that the MIDI parts
had been created with particular sounds in mind that were found only on İnan’s Roland
Fantom keyboard (which was on loan to a friend). We did not have the same sounds
available via the sampler plugin for ZB’s Protools system (IK Multimedia’s Sampletank),
but we could “map” each MIDI part to any sound on hand and “hear” what the parts
might sound like played on dierent virtual instruments. e MIDI standard allows for
basic musical data to be stored in a very compact le. e entirety of Yıldızlar Kuşandık,
in MIDI form, took up less than k worth of memory, which is signicant as the MIDI
data was exchanged regularly during the early stages of the album project, with studio
musicians, between studios, and once with a friend of the group who used a digital piano
to render one of the MIDI parts into actual digitalaudio.
From this point on, the bulk of the arrangement, soloist and session musician record-
ing, and editing work for the album technically happened at two studios, though a
considerable amount of activity happened at other spaces and in moving data between
spaces. Every day, progress and test mixes were made and shared between the two stu-
dios and auditioned for group members in both countries. Aer these audition ses-
sions group members or friends then transported digital copies to more distant nodes
throughout the geographically distributed network. Music, in various digital formats,
moved around on a daily basis, brought from here to there on ash drives and hard
drives, shipped from one location to another on CD-R or DVD-R, emailed as MPs,
and/or uploaded to and downloaded from web servers (although the latter was only
infrequently used). On many occasions multitrack Protools sessions (the session format
in common to ZB and Per Sound) on hard drives and DVD-Rs were transported by a
friend of Grup Yorum from Istanbul to Germany or vice versa, overdubs were recorded,
the sessions were copied onto the hard drive or onto a new DVD-R, and sent back the
other direction. Evaluation of an arrangement’s progress, discussions of future work
to be done, and arrangement changes were done by group consensus even though the
group in its entirety was never able to meet face-to-face.18 is social structure mirrored
the broader social movement in which the Yorumcular participated, one that was sim-
ilarly distributed and used similar communication methods to enable the temporary
connection of nodes in a larger, but hard-to-dene network.
It is impossible to document every moment when music, data, ideas, and peo-
ple moved between spaces. In part, this is due to the nature of the number of sites,
besides studios, that were temporarily a part of the production network for this
album. However, specic kinds of ows consistently occurred between specic loca-
tions. Figure. depicts a diagram of sites, individuals, and groups that participated
in the production process, with line arrows specifying the direction and frequency of
inter-node interaction. e gure also depicts, roughly, the temporal ow of produc-
tion from the pre-production stage (top) to the nished CD master (bottom). At the
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
top are songwriters and lyricists, who only had occasional, limited contact (one or two
instances) with İdil Kültür Merkezi, but with no other nodes. It is impossible to say how
many songwriters or lyricists were actually involved in the process; Iestimate that up to
a dozen individuals might have been involved in that capacity.
e diamonds to the le represent “evaluations”—moments when individuals or
groups not located at any of the studios or at İdil Kültür Merkezi approved, rejected,
Stüdyo
Sistem
(Istanbul)
İdil Kültür
Merkezi
lyricist
song-
writer
lyricist song-
writer
ZB Stüdyo
(Istanbul)
Per Sound
(Köln)
Eliot @
ZB Stüdyo
(Istanbul)
Eliot's
home
studio
pre-production
project end
first audio
tracking
audio tracking
and editing
mixing
evaluation
evaluation
evaluation
Ömer @
home
studio
(Istanbul)
Hakan @
Per sound
(Köln)
specialized
editing
work
Monoposto
Mastering
(Düsseldorf)
mastering
Grup Yorum
Yıldızlar Kuşandık
workflow diagram
indicating discrete
work locations
Key:
limited (one-time) contact
occasional music share
extended exchange of
music and ideas
one-way move of music
Time:
FIGURE.
Moving music betweenspaces
ELIOTBATES
or suggested changes to song ideas, arrangements, and mixes. It is possible that cer-
tain lyricists and/or songwriters also performed evaluations, but Iseparate them here,
as evaluation stages involved dierent technologies and kinds of connections between
nodes than studio-sited content creation. e evaluation nodes are important since they
signify specic moments when digital audio moved between locations, moments that
allowed individuals to participate in aesthetic decision-making for the album. Again,
the number of evaluation nodes is impossible to estimate, as Yorum has approximately
y former core Yorumcular and hundreds of past and present ancillary members.
Iobserved two evaluation sessions myself, during which Iwas struck by the extent to
which input from the evaluator(s) produced tangible, meaningful eects on the out-
come of the song in question. Oen, the recording process would be held up as we
waited for input from some unspecied but essential evaluation.
How did evaluations happen? From what Iwas able to ascertain, CD-Rs lled with
progress mixes that were burned at ZB were brought to İdil, subsequently “ripped” to
MPs, put on portable ash drives or ash-based MP players, which were transported by
hand to evaluators. e smallest ash-based MP players, some of which in Turkey mas-
querade as cigarette lighters, are apparently small enough that they can reach individuals
who are in prison.19 Other evaluators were located too far away (physically) for ash play-
ers to help; their distance was overcome through the same MPs being emailed or shared
through an internet-based le server.20 Music, in the form of compressed digital audio
les stored on ultra-portable devices, was able, somehow, to get to everyone who needed
to hear it, and for critique to be generated from within a maximally sized social network.
Yorumcular working in the German and Istanbul studios could readily audition
mixes, but were constantly faced with a larger problem—the impossibility of being
all together, simultaneously, in the same studio. Larger-capacity storage media—hard
drives and DVD-Rs—were essential technologies for minimizing the extent to which
collaboration was lost due to physical distance and for maximizing the potential com-
plexity of arrangements and track counts. e capability to create an album in the man-
ner of Yıldızlar Kuşandık (and here Irefer both to a homology between technologies,
engineering practices, workows, and audible aesthetics) had only existed for a few
years prior to the creation of this album; therefore, we could consider Grup Yorum to be
“early adopters” of a nascent mode of music production.
Whether specic work done for Yıldızlar Kuşandık was done in series or paral-
lel appeared to unduly aect neither technical processes nor the resulting musical
aesthetic. Parallel work required one additional step—the establishment of a single
sync-point through setting a “zero-point” in the DAW session timeline—but with that
established, work from any of the sites could be integrated into the session at any of the
sites. Parallel processing was also used in editing work that was initially done at other
sites. For example, at ZB Stüdyo we “xed” some bağlama parts that had been tracked
in Köln on the same day that Per Sound was “replacing” a piano solo done earlier at ZB
with a guitar solo that had just been tracked in Köln. us, parallel processing enabled
not just additive processes (contributing new parts), but the collective distribution of
the recording, editing, and mixing stages of album productionwork.
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
However, the distributed nature of production did generate audible aesthetic eects.
As acoustic instrumental parts and vocals were tracked at three studios with dierent
acoustic characteristics and equipment selections, the resulting recordings sounded dis-
parate rather than cohesive. ZB Stüdyo’s tracking room (where microphones are placed
and studio musicians or singers perform) was small, consisting of a rectangular concrete
structure to which was nailed an inch-thick panel of fabric-covered insulation, leading
to utter echoes and low-frequency buildup but an overall acoustically dead charac-
ter.21 Stüdyo Sistem’s tracking room was much larger, but had thicker sound-deadening
materials on the walls than ZB Stüdyo and no utter echo. Based on anecdotal evidence
and my own analysis of the recordings, Per Sound in Köln featured a substantially more
“live” tracking room, which provided a bright-sounding natural room ambience to the
bağlama tracked there that was not present on the parts tracked in Turkey. erefore, by
the mixing stage of the project, songs featured a combination of tracks recorded in dier-
ent spaces with dierent acoustic characteristics. Digital reverberation ended up being
used on many parts in an attempt to compensate for the mismatch in recorded ambience
and create the illusion of a singular acoustic space in which the recorded performances
had transpired, but audible traces of the original acoustic spaces still remained.
Distributed production resulted in one phenomenon that could not be entirely
compensated for:the dierences in studio musician performances that resulted from
extended, synchronous, interpersonal interaction between specic Grup Yorum mem-
bers, an engineer, and a studio musician. is became most apparent during track-
ing sessions featuring well-known studio musician Çetin Akdeniz, a self-proclaimed
“bağlama virtüözü.” Although most Yorumcular are competent bağlama players (and
many album parts were played by group members based in Turkey and Germany),
unlike the Yorumcular, Çetin is famous for Aegean-region repertoire knowledge and
super-fast execution of complex ornaments. Although there had been transnational
group consensus about which parts he was to record, the content of his bağlama parts
for songs like “Davet” and “Kavuşma” arose through a fairly extensive studio-situated
interaction at ZB Stüdyo, where he demonstrated several options and the nal orna-
mentation and timing choices were approved collectively by Cihan Keşkek and İnan (of
Yorum), myself, and Çetin.22 In contrast, bağlama-playing on pieces managed by Ufuk
in collaboration with Hakan Akay (the engineer at Per Sound) consistently employed
dierent ornamentation conventions and had a much more relaxed relation to the beat.
is suggests that had Çetin tracked in Köln, through the interactive process with dif-
ferent engineers and group members, the resulting timing and ornamentation aesthetic
might have been considerably dierent.
In sum, nine Yorumcular, thirty-two studio musicians and professional singers, four
recording engineers, and one mastering engineer contributed directly to the sound of
Yıldızlar Kuşandık, and dozens of others contributed indirectly, as evaluators or content
creators. Perhaps two hundred CD-Rs, twenty ve DVD-Rs, four hard drives, dozens of
ash drives or ash media-based MP players, and hundreds of MPs, all told encom-
passing hundreds of gigabytes worth of data, were in motion during the production
phase of thealbum.
ELIOTBATES
M T-S D
In this chapter Ihave focused on one case study; however, the phenomenon of dis-
tributed production is not isolated, but rather, one instance of music mobility within
a transnational production economy. Asimilar case can be seen in the creative work of
Zaza/Alevi brothers Metin and Kemal Kahraman.23 Metin was one of the founders of
Grup Yorum in and, like many migrants from the Tunceli Province to Istanbul, was
attracted to the leist movement he found there. His brother Kemal followed a similar
path, but following several years of imprisonment and torture in Turkey, became a refu-
gee in Germany in . e two brothers have been recording music together in ,
and like Grup Yorum, attempt to operate in what Leyla Neyzi terms a “transnational
space” (Neyzi :)—a nebulous space encompassing Germany, Turkey, Metin and
Kemal’s shared homeland of Dersim, and routes that connect these territorialsites.
While national borders can function as barriers toward collaboration, for other
Turkish citizens, the increased economic opportunities available in Europe, greater ease
in procuring visas, and decrease in airfare costs from increasing competition and bud-
get carriers, has led to a new generation of musicians whose livelihood depends on the
festival and concert tour economy. While foreign concerts are the most obvious man-
ifestation, many of these musicians end up doing recording work in European-based
studios that are run by and cater to the Turkish diaspora in continental Europe.24
Some Turkish-based engineers and session musicians emigrated to Germany to pro-
vide services to the Turkish diasporic recording industry.25 However, albums produced
in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and other continental locations are oen released through
labels based in Turkey. e Turkish music sector still revolves around Unkapanı, the
production hub of the transnational Turkish recording industry, but increasingly relies
on work done outside of Turkey.
Even with this newfound mobility of musicians, mobile media are still central to pro-
duction. In , toward the end of my primary research period in Turkey, Iobserved
many situations where someone involved in a German-based recording production
would come to ZB Stüdyo or another studio with an MP of an arrangement in progress,
hire a studio musician to play a specic part, burn the resulting WAV le to a CD-R, and
bring it to a studio in Germany to be incorporated into a recording. Iwould guess that
when internet upload speeds increase in Turkey, the need for the physical transporta-
tion of media will probably wane, and internet le hosting services (or a similar technol-
ogy) will serve as the medium for music’s mobility.
C
In Ivisited Grup Yorum at the İdil Kültür Merkezi in Okmeydanı (Figure.).
ey had just released their twentieth studio album—Başeğmeden (Kalan Müzik
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
Yapım, )—which unlike Yıldızlar Kuşandık was made at a time when none of the
group members were in prison. ere were several other signicant changes. Ufuk
Lüker, the long-standing group member and political exile who had coordinated the
German recording eorts, was no longer with the group, and therefore Yorum’s new-
est album did not involve the same kind of back-and-forth digital media exchange
between Germany and Turkey. Perhaps most signicant, much of the album was
recorded (but not mixed) at a brand new, small, project studio that Yorum had created
inside İdil (Figure.). İnan, who had been a primary arranger for Yıldızlar Kuşandık
and had attended every recording session for that album, did much of the engineering
himself for the new album. However, mixes still happened elsewhere, as well as some
of the recording itself. Hard drives were still moving around, if at a less frenetic rate
and traveling shorter distances. e Başeğmeden project was notable for the increasing
use of cellular phones, iPhones, and instant messaging/ online chat technologies, all
of which enabled İnan’s personal transformation from group member/musician into a
recording engineer, but those mobile communications technologies are the subject of
anotherstory.
In comparing the making of Yıldızlar Kuşandık and Başeğmeden, it is apparent that
Grup Yorum did not choose distributed production due to an aesthetic preference or
because it was easier or preferable to another extant production workow alternative.
To the contrary, challenging circumstances (imprisonment, inability to travel) led to
FIGURE
. İdil Kültür Merkezi. Photograph by Ladi Dell’aira.
ELIOTBATES
creative and innovative solutions. e portability of digital media—MIDI les, MPs,
and multitrack digital audio sessions—was what enabled all of these solutions.
A
My research was facilitated by a State Department Fellowship, generously provided by
ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey) (–), and a Fulbright IIE grant
(–). All interviews were conducted in Turkish, and translations appearing here
were made by the author. Iwish to thank İnan Altın and the other members of Grup
Yorum, Yeliz Keskin (for helping with interview transcription), Ulaş Özdemir and Hasan
Saltık at Kalan Müzik Yapım, and Ladi Dell’aira (for photographs and moral support).
N
. F-Type prisons are single-cell, high-security prisons that have largely replaced the preced-
ing norm of dormitory-style prisons. eir adoption led to the largest prison hunger strike
FIGURE
. Music-arranging workstation at İdil. Photograph by Ladi Dell’aira.
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
in modern history, claiming over one hundred deaths. See Green () and Anderson
().
. See Bates () for a more extensive ethnography of ZB Stüdyo and the recording studio
culture of Istanbul.
. It also helped that Iwas familiar with the sound of their previous albums.
. For a contextualization of s to s socialism in Turkey, see Karpat ().
. “Grup Yorum’cular Eylül darbesine karşı ortaya çıkıp, sessiz ama Eylül’e tepkili
gençliğin sesi oldular. Konserlerinin yanısıra, binlerce üniversite öğrencisinin katıldığı
forumlara, mitinglere ve eylemlere katılarak destek verdiler. Bazen Grup Yorum konser-
lerinde önceki ismi Devrimci Sol olan, sonra adını DHKP-C olarak değiştiren örgütün
sloganlarını işitmek mümkün. Fakat Grup Yorum üyeleri her söyleşide, açıklamalarında
hiçbir illegal örgüte üye olmadıklarını belirtiyorlar. Emperyalist sömürüye, işgallere,
işkenceye karşı çıkıp sosyalist bir ülke ve dünya kurulması için demokratik bir mücadele
içinde olduklarını söylüyorlar. Tüm bunlardan kurtulmanın yolu olarak halkı örgütlen-
meye davet ediyorlar. Kendilerinin de örgütlü olduklarını, demokratik mücadele içinde
yer aldıklarını açıklıyorlar.” İnan Altın, personal communication with author, January
,.
. In an article about the performing ensemble Kardeş Türküler, a group inspired by Grup
Yorum that performs music of many Anatolian ethnicities but eschews blatantly political
lyrics, Orhan Kahyaoğlu notes that simply asserting a discourse of multiculturalism makes
music, or musicians, “automatically political” in Turkey (:).
. Alevis are a hereditary heterodox order that live throughout Turkey and Azerbaijan and
are closely aliated with the Bektaşi Su order. Although some Alevi music has long had
a political bent, the Sivas hotel re of , where Sunni extremists murdered thirty-seven
prominent Alevi writers and musicians, is frequently cited as the primary event aer which
Alevi cultural expression was unambiguously regarded as political (Sökefeld :).
. Ekşi Sözlük (www.sourtimes.org), which translates to “sour dictionary,” was launched by
Murat Arslan and Sedat Kapanoğlu in , and is arguably the most widely used and
signicant Turkish language social media website. It is a “social dictionary,” meaning that
the focus of user activity is on creating multiple, oen competing denitions of words and
phrases. e social dictionary phenomenon is popular among Turkish speakers in Turkey
and abroad, and clones of Ekşi Sözlük were started by students at Istanbul Technical, Bilgi,
and Uludağ Universities. Several hundred thousand Turkish speakers participate in this
social mediaform.
. İnan Altın, personal communication with author, June ,.
. Ibid.
. RTÜK (Radyo Televizyon Üst Kurulu), which stands for the Radio Television High
Council, was established in out of an extant set of laws that regulated private broadcast
media (Algan :).
. See Hassanpour for examples of the myriad legal reasons provided by the government
for censorship. It should be noted that censorship sometimes transpires with no overtly
stated reason, as was the case with Grup Yorum’s album Feda (Kahyaoğlu :).
. Anecdotal evidence supplied by Hasan Saltık, the owner of Kalan Müzik Yapım, suggests
that prior to the industry-wide collapse of sales in , most Grup Yorum albums each
sold at least , legitimate copies and countless more bootleg copies.
. Regarding technologies, the rst consumer hard drive with a gb capacity was released
in ; the rst sub- DVD-R burner (the Pioneer DVR-) was released in ,
ELIOTBATES
and in the same year, Protools TDM . soware with MIXplus hardware was still limited
to sixty-four tracks of simultaneous playback (Digidesign).
. Several online forums have initiated international song production competitions, where
musicians, engineers, and producers in dierent countries collaborate toward the cre-
ation of new recordings. One such competition is CAPE (Composers, Artists, Producers,
Engineers), which was launched in on the website ProSoundWeb, later relocated to
other music industry forums, and by had completed ten rounds, enlisting the tal-
ents of several hundred dierent musicians (http://thewombforums.com/forumdisplay.
php?f=).
. From late to early , the most common home or oce internet connection was
a kbit download/ kbit upload, which cost approximately a month for a gb a
month bandwidth-limited account, and a month for an unlimited account. Internet
cafes typically had a faster kbit connection, but one that was shared by sixteen or
more computers. Rated speeds were only attainable between two peers within Turkey. As
the internet was a government-controlled monopoly and there was only a single backbone
entering Turkey, bandwidth between Turkey and other countries was very limited, par-
ticularly during peak usagetimes.
. İdil Kültür Merkezi (İdil Cultural Center), now located in the Okmeydanı neighborhood
of Istanbul, is a licensed association that provides low-cost education, a small concert
venue, and a library in addition to housing the oces of Tav ır magazine and the Anadolu
Sesi (Anatolian Sound) radio station.
. e Grup Yorum project was the only group project Isaw during my research in Turkey
where every aspect of arrangement, recording, and mixing was decided by democratic
group consensus without the direction of a single producer or band leader.
. I was not able to obtain data about exactly how ash media devices were transported into
prisons and how feedback made it back to GrupYorum.
. Although the portability of MPs allows for a distributed network of individuals to be
more extensively involved with the production stage of an album, similar circuits of pro-
duction have existed with Grup Yorum for at least een years. One former group member
Iinterviewed, who wished to remain nameless, recounted tales about being imprisoned
in the mid-s, routinely smuggling musical scores and lyrics sheets out of prison, and
fabricating makeshi utes out of water pipes. What is new, therefore, is the ability for
recorded audio media—in digital form—to move through similar circuits.
. “Dead” and “live” are non-rigorous terms that tend to refer to two characteristics of room
sound:the reverberation time (the time it takes for a source signal to decay to dB below
its original value), and the overall frequency response curve for room reections. “Dead”
rooms have shorter reverberation time (less than a second) and less high frequency energy
in room reections, while live rooms have a longer reverberation time and more high fre-
quency energy in the reected sound. Flutter echoes, typically considered undesirable for
recording studios, are a property of rooms where the reverberation, rather than having a
linear decay, has a pulsating, rhythmic echo eect.
. For more on the story of the song “Kavuşma,” see Bates (:–).
. Zaza Alevis are Zazaki-speaking Alevis, and hence have two ethnic identity distinctions in
addition to their identities as Turkish subjects.
. e development of Turkish performing and recording culture in Germany from the s
until is well documented in Greve ().
DISTRIBUTED RECORDING PRODUCTION IN TURKISH POLITICALMUSIC
. While Iwas conducting research in Turkey, Gürsoy Tanç (a studio guitarist and arranger
who had performed on Grup Yorum’s album and many other projects at ZB Stüdyo) and
Metin Kalaç (an engineer who is best known for his Karadeniz popular music engineering,
see Bates )both temporarily emigrated to Germany.
R
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D
Grup Yorum. Yıldızlar Kuşandık. Kalan Müzik Yapım CD , , compact disc/
audiocassette.
Grup Yorum. Başeğmeden. Kalan Müzik Yapım CD , , compactdisc.