A couple of years in the past, when Isik Kural was again in his hometown of Istanbul, he dug out a group of subject recordings that he’d made as a young person. Listening again, he was struck by a revelation: “So loud,” he marveled in an interview. “The town is so loud!” Kural’s music, then again, is hushed within the excessive. Since releasing his debut album, As Flurries, in 2019, the Glasgow-based musician has developed an idiosyncratic type out of nylon-string guitar, synthesizers, subject recordings, and whisper-soft singing. On his new album Moon in Gemini, his music is so wispy that it regularly feels as if a powerful gust of wind would possibly scale back it to a tangle of threads.
The impact Kural conjures right here is much less like a teeming metropolis than a neighborhood blanketed by a snowstorm—an unusually vivid calm, so nonetheless you’ll be able to hear snowflakes touchdown in a crinkling heap. Flute wafts atop gently plucked guitar. One-finger piano melodies trickle over Casiotone synth patches. Most songs happen towards a backdrop of rustling or birdsong. Fleeting moments of musical déjà vu—Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Says”—fade into bedtime lullabies. The harmless intimacy of the scene is that of a child beneath a blanket with a xylophone and a flashlight, quietly buzzing sing-song refrains.
It’s not simply the quantity of the music that implies a naptime reverie; Kural’s lyrics usually really feel clipped from kids’s books. His songs are a patchwork of clouds, rain, seafoam, snow, leaping rabbits. Moonbeams slip between eyelashes; seashells, marigolds, and ghosts all flip up in a number of songs. “Pastel blue blooms in between/A single drop and the leaves of the moon,” he murmurs haltingly on “Prelude,” stringing fragmentary pictures and non-sequiturs right into a lilting meditation on metamorphosis. In some locations, Kural’s winsome melodies recall Ana Roxanne; elsewhere I’m reminded of Grouper’s affected person loops—if her music have been made below the affect of light PBS cartoons from the ’70s.
Cynics, doomers, and the terminally hard-headed could also be turned off by all this beaming niceness; seen with a suspicious eye, the album’s air of twinkly-eyed naivete—to not point out Kural’s dulcet, preschool-teacher tone—can verge on kitsch or self-parody. “A smile begins from the eyes wider than skies/Speech bubbles embrace jasmines of shock,” he coos on “Stems of Water”; “A joyful daylight hides inside a waterfall.”
However in a few of his instrumentals, issues usually are not as placid as they appear. Loops of violin pool collectively in “Daywarm Birds,” stirred by trilling flutes; it’s calm but additionally barely spooky, with chilly open fifths gesturing towards older, weirder types of people music. And peer beneath the pastel floor of Kural’s lyrics, and stranger issues are afoot. In “Nearly a Ghost,” a few baby padding down the steps, what at first appears merely cutesy (“untied laces/tenderfeet”) turns unusual and wild:
