Ekin Fil - Being Near LP

$18.98

For many years now, Ekin Fil's spectral dream-pop deconstructions hold a thousand-yard stare of an unconsolable melancholy; and she's drawn the highly favorable comparisons to Grouper and lovesliecrushing thanks to her understated yet beloved catalogue of releases on Root Strata, Students Of Decay, No Kings, and now The Helen Scarsdale Agency. Born Ekin Uzeltuzenci and based in her native Istanbul, she cites the shoegazing classics (Cocteau Twins, Cranes, Slowdive, etc.) as her earliest influence, seeking out worn issues of Melody Maker or NME from second hand shops and trading cassettes with friends and fellow enthusiasts. This Proustian obsession with rainsoaked melodies from the British Isles blossomed into a foundation for her own art. Being Near stands as the pinnacle in her luminous career, with achingly beautiful and elegantly simple arrangements for guitar and electronics saturated in cavernous amounts of reverb, whose semi-mystical blur extends well into the vocal melodies. Ekin Fil's songs emote a timelessness of human desire and longing, albeit constrained to this plane of existence. For Uzeltuzenci, her music is not an escape valve from the patriarchal hammer of the dominant culture in Turkey, but a reflection through her own condition, in her own context, from her own body that may have actualized what Helene Cixous theorized as "ecriture feminine" but through sound and not language.