Ataşehir

AVM

AVM : Turkish acronym for alışveriş merkezi or shopping center/mall
These events take place over the course of a single day.

Written and recorded by Sumatran Black in Istanbul, Turkey 2019-2020

Ataşehir

Colorful Places to Live and Play

Ataşehir, is a huge residential development on the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey. The titles are taken from aspirational advertising slogans of various residential developments from around the world.

Notes about the recording:

A long-term obsession with the Stars of The Lid album “And Their Refinement of the Decline” has meant that I’ve always dabbled in drone style compositions and so it was perhaps inevitable that a full drone release would happen sooner or later.

The residential development area of Ataşehir is an unusual choice as an inspirational jumping off point. For many its skyline dominating luxury apartment complexes and implausibly shiny shopping malls are representative of the worst sides of aspirational living. But for me there the area has always evoked some, albeit brief, deep tremendous feeling of awe and possibility.

Of course it passes and my mind wakes up to the cynically designed park areas, haunting lack of pedestrians and the designated entertainment complexes devised for “modern urban living”. You can imagine it all as a scale model on an architect’s boardroom table scrutinized by billionaire investors who would never dream of living in such a place.

And so it is my own internal tension between these two opposing feelings that I’ve attempted to express in this collection of compositions.

Written and recorded by Sumatran Black in Istanbul, Turkey during 2016-2017.