Kubilay Üner is a person of boundless optimism and enthusiasm, with razor sharp vision and overflowing passion. His new opus INN PARADISO shows us just how wildly inventive an electronic composer with no perceived boundaries can be!
"I do a lot of sketching. Always have... Over the past year or so a new theme emerged in my sketches - my ideas were getting thicker, denser, more complex, more layered, more distorted, perhaps even more angry. But also extremely vivid, strong, alive, vibrant. They were all about 'more is more', so I called it my 'maximalism'..." (Kubilay Üner)
"Maximalism" is a great way to describe this music. When your source material ranges from sampled escalators, wolf packs, cat fights, trains, and random street punks, to a cast of nearly 30 brilliant musicians scattered across the globe performing on strings, brass, winds, and other bizarre and exotic instruments, how could you call it anything else. What's really amazing about all this, though, is that INN PARADISO is anything but a mash of jumbled sound. It's a searingly distinct vision, tight and coherent, and though the composer claims "it's not about anything," it feels like a memory of an undiscovered sonic paradise!
"I realized I probably borrowed a lot from painters like Gerhard Richter...who starts with a layer of actual paint instead of, say, a pencil outline sketch of the shapes, then scrapes, paints again, scrapes again, scrapes some more. Similarly, I kept adding to the original layer, whatever it was, by recording over it, processing it, recording again, processing the whole thing, doing it again, layering again, and so on. All this is done based entirely on the question, What do I want to hear next, and where?" (Kubilay Üner)
By sculpting this music in such a way, Üner has revealed a kind of pan-experiential sonic masterpiece. The effect upon listening is almost like an unveiling of music that exists all around us in our daily environments. Indeed many of the sources come from familiar places, but we almost never stop and listen to them as music. INN PARADISO offers us the chance to hear the familiar as unusual, and the unusual as familiar.
"Since these are neither songs nor film scores, this music is just about creating a "music-scape" for you to wander around in. What you see, hear, make out, even if it's a real sound like a wolf or an escalator, is just there to sound the way it does. There's no story, no meaning, just a ballet of sound gestures coming together to create a dance. You make your own story - or just enjoy the movement and colors.
"One more thing: This is listening music - pour a drink or a cup of tea, put on a good pair of headphones or sit down in front of your stereo, and enjoy the trip!" (Kubilay Üner)
OK Kubi. I'm in!
—Daniel Rosenboom, founder of Orenda Records