Erkin Cavus and Reentko Dirks bring together the worlds of East and West in their music.“
Milliyet
„Their music is performed with such overwhelming power that the listener is carried away and moved to tears.“
Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten
After their musical reflection on the past with their successful album Istanbul 1900, Dresden-based guitarists Erkin Cavus and Reentko Dirks now create sonic visions of the future for the metropolis by the Bosphorus with new album Ütopya.
Inspired by already existing projects and ideas like urban farming, Tomorrow.city or Futurzwei, it is about the transformation of urban traffic flow, extensive renaturation and a new definition of public spaces in favour of non-commercial, community-oriented uses. Treehouses replace shopping malls, ping-pong tables line Bosphorus bridge instead of long traffic jams, a public library is set up in the airport.
Ütopya is also musically innovative, especially in the duo’s characteristic sound and some surprising collaborations. In 2021, the delicate and atmospherically dense music of the two guitarists delighted audiences and the press, and in some countries they even managed to conquer the charts. The radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur called Istanbul 1900 a “fantastic album,” the magazine Jazz Thing considered it to be “in its very own cosmos,” and the newspaper Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten attested an “overwhelming force.”
The most noticeable innovation in the music on Ütopya are the featured guests who are enhancing the sonic panorama. “Erkin and I had been thinking about what we could do differently this time without compromising the aesthetic of the guitar duo.” So now drummer Demian Kappenstein, with whom Dirks also plays in the quartet Masaa, is featured as a sound designer instead of his usual place behind the drums. His arrangements use intentionally minimalistic electronic sounds, enriching the guitar duo’s aesthetic. “Our thought was that such delicate electronic vignettes are fitting for ‘the future’, the theme of the album, and at the same time emphasize the quiet, sometimes almost meditative character of the music,” Dirks explains, describing Kappenstein’s sounds as “something audiophile that you don’t necessarily discover right away.”
For two compositions Reentko Dirks invited the pianist Clemens Christian Pötzsch. “In order to be able to play and improvise together well, I designed the pieces for this cooperation from the start; I even wrote ‘Galeri Avrasya’ on the piano.” For the album’s title piece, Dirks devised a dialogue format, in which guitars and grand piano engage in a kind of conversation. Bjarke Falgren, another contact from the Masaa world, arranged and recorded the strings on “Taksim Ormanları” and “Yeni Galata Liman”. “We requested an impressionistic cluster sound,” Dirks recounts, while leaving the process of execution up to him. With his refined sense he feels his way into the pieces and intuitively creates each part of the strings.”
Background:
The creative will of the duo reflects the different personal backgrounds of the two musicians. Erkin Cavus (*1977) spent many years of his life in Istanbul. Here he became a celebrated guitarist, also playing alongside popular (pop) artists such as the legendary Erkan Ogur and Ferhat Göcer. After an education with a focus on Western classical music, Cavus began to develop his unconventional playing technique on the fretless guitar neck in 1996 and had his first special guitar built. It allows him to play with quarter tones, like on the lute oud. In the early 2000s, he completed his master class studies in Dresden, where he met Reentko Dirks. As Duo Kalkan they won the special prize at the international guitar competition in Osnabrück, released the album Planet Kalkan, and wrote a feature film score.
Reentko Dirks (*1979) became known especially for his individual, often rhythmic-percussive playing techniques. For this, he intensively studied flamenco and Arabic music. He worked with the composer Richard Horowitz for his album Sounds For The Silver Screen, the following Le Cirque was nominated for the German Record Critics’ Award in 2013. In the meantime, Dirks played with Yo-Yo Ma and Giora Feidman. The CD Carmen with Ksenija Sidorova, co-arranged and recorded by Dirks, received the Echo Classical Music Prize in 2017. Since 2019, he has been a steady member of the quartet Masaa, whose poetic songs alternate between Arabic melodies and jazz and are widely praised. In 2021, the band received the German Jazz Award.
credits
released September 15, 2023
Erkin Cavus: acoustic double neck guitar
Reentko Dirks: bariton guitar, octave guitar
Clemens Christian Poetzsch: piano on #1 and #6
Bjarke Falgren: strings and string arrangements on #2 and #10
Deminan Kappenstein: sounds
All titles published by Traumton Musikverlag
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Mohi Buschendorf
Produced Mohi Buschendorf
Co-produced by Reentko Dirks, Erkin Cavus and Demian Kappenstein
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