Dua

"Beautiful new music from Sinemis...soothing healing techno sufi sounds..."
Nemone, BBC 6Music

"Traditional ney flutes, breathy textures, amorphous, enveloping soundscapes produce an absorbing, hypnotic sensation that leaves you feeling subtly altered, yielding a gently transcendent feel. Resonant music for a heightened sense of awareness."
Electronic Sound

"A mesmerizing, sophisticated combination of Sufi music and ambient electronics create an inviting sonic landscape. Sine has tapped into something timeless."
Foxy Digitalis

Circassian-Turkish producer Sine Buyuka debuts new solo project Sinemis with lush, graceful album ‘Dua’, very gently combining elements from the ancestral Sufi music of her homeland with sophisticated techno-inflected ambient.

Dua’s life began with a life-threatening illness. “I started feeling unwell last year and no one could figure out the reason,” Sine writes. “It was a scary time, not knowing and trying to manage symptoms while they slowly worsened. In late 2021, while I was visiting my family in Turkey during the Christmas break, I was taken into A&E. After more tests, I had a diagnosis and had surgery in January.” Following this, within the healing process - highly emotional as well as physical - Sine was drawn to the traditional Sufi music of Turkey and the Middle East. Ritualistic music to accompany ancient sema ceremonies, in which whirling dervishes enter a transcendental consciousness through ecstatic movement and repetition.

With this influence at heart, Sine began work on ‘Dua’, with a newly-formed artist name to signify new, unfamiliar music from a celebrated electronic producer. For her, the album marks a significant step in her recovery. But it is also a potent marriage of contemporary and ancestral trancestates, interweaving sci-fi synthesis and floor shaking bass tones with mystic imagery, textures and timbres. A meditative, spiritual balm that melds field recordings, found sounds, ambient soundscapes, electronics and acoustic instrumentation to celebrate life and survival in challenging circumstances.

The breathy, cinematic tones of album opener ‘Dua’ hover and shiver in preparatory stasis as broken-machine punctuation begins to dot rhythmically through the space. A yearning, repeated vocal sample - a living, beating heart inside the machine - characterises a crucial theme for the album: the marriage of digital instrumentation with the analogue, the human and the organic. Later, ‘Elegy’ reflects its title with heartbreaking chordal shifts and glitching birdsong, conjuring a sound world somewhere between KMRU and Max Richter. Key track ‘Gazel’ moves in glacial slo-mo, like whirling dervishes frozen in time at the peak of their trance. Euphoric ceremony made haunting and poignant without losing a mote of power…

Across the album, the timbres of Sufi ritual are subtly captured by the otherworldly presence of the historic ney flute, said to be as old as the Holy Books. “Sufi music generally uses several different instruments but the ney flute is at the heart of it. The sounds emanating from this fascinating instrument kept capturing my imagination and I wanted integrate it into my music,” Sine tells us. Working both with samples and with Turkish musician Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Sine achieves a rare balance of reverence and re-contextualisation for such a time-honoured instrument, here performed by a lifelong student of its intricacies and mysteries. In Sinemis’ hands, the processing and sonic treatment of the ney even sometimes renders it indistinguishable from Dua’s synthesis and sound-design.

‘Dua’ was mixed and mastered in Dolby Atmos (available on Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon) to capture the immersive experience of Sufi music.

credits

released November 11, 2022

Cover artwork by Özge Cöne.
Binaural and Atmos mixes by Tom Bailey (Air), mastering by Matt Colton (Metropolis).
Stereo mixes by Mark Dobson, mastering by Joshua Eustis.

All tracks by Sinemis. Flow and Elegy contain sample by Rani Dar. Only Breath contains sample by Omar Faruk Tekbilek and Rani Dar.

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