The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 7th October 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
Having effectively rediscovered her appreciation for the guitar during the pandemic, Ekin Fil returns to her musical roots on Dora Agora, although it doesn’t sound like a ‘guitar’ album in any obvious or conventional sense. The guitar is acoustic, and the compositions are – at least in structural terms – limited to a couple of chords, played in a scratchy strum back and forth, providing more rhythm than melody. There’s so little to take a firm grasp of here, and not only structurally. How to appraise something that touches to lightly, offers so little that’s tangible, and yet has such an effect on a deeper, essentially subliminal level?
Subliminal is indeed the word, a word I spent several hours scratching around for as the most appropriate adjective for this most affecting of works. It touches you, and reaches deep, but you simply have no idea why. After all, there isn’t much to it, at least superficially. There’s no real dynamic, there are no hooks or choruses to speak of, and it’s more a listening experience defined by what isn’t rather than what is. But what it is, is utterly compelling.
I often try to consider just how listening to an album makes me feel over what it necessarily does, but on listening to Dora Agora I can honestly say I’m not sure, and can’t be certain if I will ever know.
Across the ten compositions, the majority of which are comparatively brief, with the longest being just over four and a half minutes, and the majority being closer to three, Ekin conjures waves of wispy atmosphere, and the songs flow through your system and psyche without a trace, existing as nothing but vapour which evaporates instantaneously.
The first couple of pieces are instrumental, and on the subsequent songs featuring vocals, as on ‘Ghost Boy’, she spins achingly magnificently misty melancholia, minimal shoegaze where her voice and acoustic guitar drift in a cloud of echo and the sparsest ripples of synth. ‘Buried Again’ is haunting, eerie, and Ekin sounds like a spirit floating through air.
The production leans toward the lo-fi but not to the detriment of the songs: quite the opposite, in fact. The songs are so sparse, so skeletal, as to be barely there, existing almost intangibly, often so nebulous as to lack obvious structure. ‘Agora’ is built loosely around an undulating back-and-forth chord repetition, while ‘Bulutlar Kuslar’ is overlaid with myriad incidentals as she skips breezily through its soft, open space. ‘Yo Feelings’ is so vague that it slips free of any constraints of order as it points the album into the cloud-flecked sky. As the last seconds of echo reverberate into the distance, there emerges a sense that Ekin Fil has transcended the realms of music and the earthbound domain to alchemise something that’s truly beyond.
AA
Aural Aggravation 