On Hearing Voices

Contrasting with Mekawei’s dense and complex environments, Eldar Tagi’s sparse, skeletal, pizzicato guitar and daxophone instrumentation creeps in slowly and lays the groundwork for a raw, evocative, and powerful set with vocalist Saadet Türköz, in their premiere collaboration. We are reseated in the round, an opening poem from Nâzım Hikmet gives way to Türköz’s ensnaring voice that stutters, growls, soothes, and breaks across the space. The sound shudders off the walls through amplification, yet at times, Türköz blissfully ignores the microphone, opting instead to meet the gaze of the audience directly with her voice. Türköz and Tagi guide us through an expansive garden of articulations, bundling us in the suspense of sentences or phrases that never seem to end. They expand, wrapping us in language that deconstructs and reforms as syllables congregate and tremble among winding harmonies.

Türköz informs me that her practice of interweaving text and polyvocality derives from the Kazakh tradition of spontaneous lyrical improvisation: songs, lyrics and phrases are all dreamt into being in real-time to celebrate, or to mourn. To remember and to memorialize. Mid-performance, she is inspired to recite a personal text about a Kazakh horseman preparing for his death. The horseman knowing however that his knowledge and training have been passed on to his children through generational vocality, he can die in peace. For Türköz, the performance space as well is inseparable from the flood of lyrics that pass through her—the Kuppelhalle as a former cremation site fills her with a need to acknowledge those whose bodies have drifted through this space. Türköz turns to Tagi and remarks, mid-song:

“I want to tell you many things about people who have no roof over their heads, who have had their homes and cultural assets stolen, and who have lost their lives under unjust systems. Well, it all goes on because we want to believe that ethical rightness remains desirable forever. We'll keep at it.”⁴

Here, Türköz accompanies the voices of Mekawei: these voices breathe space into the precarity of lives on the edge. Voices that hand down generational stories, that make maps of space where memories live between bodies and across border zones. I hear multiple sobs, someone in the audience cries softly above me. The voice’s characters are many, and now seem to populate the space, to appear alongside the audience as well, in all their multiplicities. The stretching and clattering of both Tagi and Türköz’s instruments work as a seamless pair yet resist the urge to be woven together. Instead, these ruptures encourage to mingle among stories fragmented by lost, forgotten, or destroyed histories—to hear with voices.