THOUGHTS BEHIND "FORMATION" 

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 Introduction  

 

With my first professional work, Arsnova, I’ve worked on the reflections of my own stories with music as an art form. Afterwards, with the Routine EP, I have tried to describe what is going on around me, with all it’s beauty and ugliness. Both were works where I’ve described the effects of the exterior world that had on me. This time, I wanted to go to a place where I have never been before. I have spent most of my time reflecting deeply as to how I should describe what lay within me. I’ve searched for an improvement in my own thoughts. A question occupied my mind: “What is the one thing that is inevitable?” Naturally, the first thing that came to my mind was death. Man, mistakenly thinks that everything but death is inevitable and thus tries continually to shape his world around this idea. Approaching this idea makes man think as if he has a control at first. But in reality, life is as inevitable as death itself. Plus, it is full of possibilities.

These possibilities, as a part of the chaos which they are a part of, completely changes what is happening right now, what has happened before and what is happening right at this moment. What keeps happening, whether it is big or small, is the cause for everything that has happened before, is happening at this moment and will happen in the future. Thus I came to the conclusion that what is inevitable is actually the thing that is happening itself and that everything that exists is imprisoned in an endless spiral of dialectics. What is inevitable is change itself. By deciding to work on this “change”, I’ve let go of what the exterior world means to me and instead focused on my interior world. This was a really interesting and one of the most exciting adventures that I could ever begin and in the end, the theme that I wanted to work on was finally clear. To be fair, I did not have to look too far. To examine change itself, the safest path is for one to examine himself. I’ve examined, day by day, the change of my behaviors and ideas which I never had the incentive to examine or question before. The laws of nature are clear: and so I have changed, day after day.

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Months later, I was done with my thoughts. Then I realized that I wanted to work on the nature of “change” itself in a more inclusive way than just relying on my own stories. I’ve decided to work on a more, high resolution, fictional plane, where every little detail is clear. Even if it started from my own experience, “Formation” was now telling the story of what every human being is living through but can’t find the words to express: the state of “being a self”, the moments, the effects of things happening and the inevitable change.

 Part 1: “Hero” 

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Once upon a time, one of my friends told me that every story begins with a simple sentence, such as “There was a man... someone came to town one day” or something else. So, every story begins by creating a hero for itself. I have neglected this idea for too long. So now I wanted to tell an epic story. In order to express more than just my own reality, the first thing I did was to create a hero and start the process of change by making him be aware of himself. The hero that we describe here is figurative; it is a thought object that can represent more than one single thing: a human being, a society, an animal, a love affair or anything whether it’s tangible or intangible. In other words, it is whatever the audience needs it to be. The reason why I try to portray these moments of realization in a figurative or even in a divine manner is because I find them no different than a creation of God himself. The most fun and perfect part of change is the moment that you realize its necessity. The rest, whether it is good or bad, brings a lot of work and struggle with it. I carved out this divine moment with the touch of the “Human” and thus with the thoughts themselves. What comes after this will tell what is actually necessary for this divine realization to come to an end in four parts. This part tells the story of the wake up call of a figurative hero who struggles to get out of an unknown and endless loop.

 

 Part 2: “In a Flash” 

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This part had the most strange creation process for me in this opus. I have tried to get a focus on a process that has begun and that its effect is growing as it moves on. My main goal was to tell that even a single moment can have a huge impact on man. I have spent my time getting lost chasing wrong ideas, so now I have decided to create by improvising as much as I can. This made the whole process become really interesting for me. I’ve simply put the second part to an inspection process in order to avoid simple mistakes and provide technical necessities. Apart from that, I left everything in it’s whole nakedness and did not revisit the improvisation parts.

“What can a single moment of a man can hold?” was the question I’ve tried to answer with music, so I needed a natural and free path to roam. I needed to create a space where the music was so pure that I can roam free to catch a moment with every little thing that it holds; like the touch of the wind on human skin, memories, every color, every smell and the weight of knowing the fact that you know. To this end, I’ve decided to express this with a piano solo. This is also the only piano solo in the opus.

 Part 3: “Touched” 

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Thematically, this part does not continue with the previous one, but rather it’s a second look to the moment that opened up in the last part. This is also a bridge that brings us closer to for the fourth and fifth parts.

I have searched for the things that needed to be accepted and greeted that comes with what is experienced. For me, one of the most intense things that a human can experience in their lives is becoming aware of their own borders and accepting them. At least that was the case for me. Man can never cheat what is inevitable.

 

 Part 4: “Deviations”  

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I began working on this part after deciding to work on a thought that found its own way. I have tried to work on the absolute unreachable status of this goal. I think it was a decent idea to symbolize this theme with deviations in music. I’ve designed my instruments to act as if they were deviating from their paths while trying to reach their destinations and separated them in different themes. Acquiring a new form requires a goal, deviations from that goal and being unable to reach it, trying again and if necessary take a whole different approach and in the end putting them all together. Despite all of the deviations, even if I can’t reach what is unreachable, to put together what you’ve acquired, adds a sense to the senselessness of expecting an “end”. There is no end. So we can get out of this deep well now. This was the point where my enthusiasm for that divine change ended sharply.

 Part 5: “Someone Else”
 

This part was like a person who felt they were weak and can’t stand to sit still beneath a rubble, but then, with a last push of strength was able to get out and suddenly felt much stronger. Who knows which one is stronger? The rubble or the ability to get out of it? This is what it feels like to have the ambition to be complete. What would I do when I had the power? I could use it senselessly as I pleased. This must be the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind. There might be setbacks on the hold over power, but the desire to be complete will fix that. I thought that this story should not be ending here. This “change” is not something that has an end. This is where I realized that the nature of my subject, change, has a paradoxical relation with music. One was eternal, unstoppable and

unavoidable, the other was finite, just like you, me and everything that ever exists. How could I describe something finite in an infinite form? And yet this story is just about music and every composition has a conclusion. The dominance that we describe in this last part and every feeling that mistakenly looks like completion, actually brings new necessities with them. Here I can only hope that the audience can realize that this end is actually a beginning.

 

 Conclusion 

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Everyone has the right to be skeptical about the truths of manmade dualities. The difference between good and bad, beauty and ugliness, is not the same as day and night. One is a natural duality that we have to perceive, the other is one that we do not want to. Because it is manmade, I can’t decide if the duality that creates change in this music is going from good to bad or vice versa. All I can say is that this opus begins from an organic point that are led by feelings in both compositional and technical terms and that it goes on to a more mechanical path where we can find the products of our thoughts. But there is no telling where this change is leading to. I can’t be objective on this subject because I’m a human being. Thoughts, after all, both gives me the opportunity to create my own reality and also makes me doubt its own reality. The evolution of an animal to a human being and incorporating thoughts into its life is no doubt a progress. But now that we understand that this “thought” is not all mighty and that we are actually pretty limited, we are now trying to become humbler and started treating these “thoughts” as devil’s work. All we can do is to try and think better. The imagining of something greater than itself but not being able to become that, forces humans to face the unsatisfactory fact of being simply human.

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