Zeynep Toraman - In a Dark House

A Closer Listen

Rife with mysteries, silences, and unheimlich spaces, In a Dark House, the debut album of Turkish composer and musician Zeynep Toraman, released on Portland’s own Obscure & Terrible label, is a trip through a series of sonic and psychological states that leaves a listener dazzled and eager to go back for more.

Toraman states that she considers her role for this project to be as much that of a curator and archivist as a composer/musician. But while the four tracks have an assembled, almost manufactured feel to them – there are numerous samples and field recordings in the work – Toraman’s intuitive grasp of her materials combined with her structural sensibilities imbue the totality with a convincing, organic quality.

“Poems” is a carefully balanced mobile of sounds that swing through the space of the track and orbit each other before detaching and fading into silence. The track opens with layered, pulsing pads buttressed by granulated swells, and is soon followed by ringing gongs on a fretless bass. A short, sudden blast from a chattering chorus of sparrows bursts in and cuts off, followed by tones that bloom and rise into bright lines of feedback. But these fade too and the track continues from there, with new elements emerging and drifting past, casting brief shadows on their surroundings before vanishing.

Nothing, however, is arbitrary. Even the track title, “Poems,” suggests that what one is listening to is not a sonic poem in particular with one fixed subject, but rather a sonic essay of sorts about the nature of poetry, its openness of form, its eschewal of direct meaning, its obliquity. Exploring themes instead of making statements, the other tracks on the album follow suit.

“Nocturnes” is all cloaked, levitating atmosphere, haunted by rolling fog-beds of sound, ephemeral tones that braid and harmonize, and what sounds like the steady, isolated blip of a radar screen. Toraman burrows into this darkness and roams, stretching and testing its contours until, unexpectedly, an isolated note from a viola slices in. But as a musical gesture it’s too late. A slow-rising black-hole hum encroaches and pulls the track down to its close.

The low-end pianoforte chord that opens “Chimes” comes as a shock and announces a shift in approach toward a more immediate acoustic quality. As the track proceeds, a hint of a melody can be detected. Dry notes get pulled almost painfully from a violin. A marimba is bowed. Yet Toraman slowly and surreptitiously slips away these footholds, and the track eventually resolves to a bright if barren soundscape devoid of detail other than a stark, present absence.

The closing track, “Gardens,” advances this new approach with the subtle introduction of a human voice, one that hums and sings and mutters while floating in a field of rumbling, fluttering percussion and high-frequency tones. The voice fades and the tones assume prominence, existing just beyond a conscious level of perception so that one feels them more than hears them as a kind of constant aural pressure. Beneath this piercing stratosphere, Toraman gradually reintroduces more keyboard throbs and readily discernible mid-frequency tones, building the new mixture up into a glowing, pulsing presence that hovers and radiates and persists – as do the high-frequency tones. As the music sinks into a slow fade, it becomes a challenge to discern when the track actually ends. The effect is mesmerizing and uncanny.

The only solution is to go to the beginning and start again. (Damian Van Denburgh)