At the heart of ‘The Sun Is Parallel’, the hotly anticipated debut album from Swiss-Turkish musician Mehmet Aslan, is a devotion to records and alternative musical cultures spanning decades and continents. With diverse tempos and styles, from frazzled electronics for open-minded dancefloors to cinematic instrumental passages, the album finds a devoted producer at his most considered and sensitive; all made with squinting eyes looking up at the sun, with the grooves soaked in its omnipotent glare.
With most of the album being written and performed with his live bandmates Daniel Pankau (guitar) and Alican Tezer (drums), the result is an adventurous and constantly surprising body of work. It benefits from Aslan’s precision as a producer while retaining the dynamics of live instrumentation, giving it an organic and textured feel, situating Aslan amongst similarly transcendent producers/arrangers like Floating Points and Lucrecia Dalt.
Driven by questions related to the fluidity of his own identity, community and migration, as well as the unusual stretch of time the past years have provided to investigate oneself, ‘The Sun Is Parallel’ is informed by movements from Sun Ra to hauntology. The record’s cosmic, intuitive mood is evident immediately from opening salvo ‘Fountain’, leading into ‘Domo’, a tapestry of knotty drums against a backdrop of guitar licks reminiscent of Ennio Morricone.
The fervent acid funk of ‘Rowndbass Acid’ releases the endorphins associated with Aslan’s many hours stood in the DJ booth, but ‘If I Can Belong Anywhere’ pulls the rug back into more searching territory: The album’s most declarative statement draws its title from the phrase “if I can belong here, I can belong anywhere”, with beautiful melancholy drone displaced by thundering drums. “What you’ve got to remember”, intones the voice of James Baldwin, “is that everyone you’re looking at is also you.”
Alongside the Spanish-born singer Niño de Elche, ‘Tangerine’ delves into flamenco inspired sounds for a searing mini-epic that unfurls like the peel of its namesake, before bottling the groove and virtuoso guitar for a near-instrumental accompaniment, ‘Tangerine Sun’, where the most subtle of acid lines nudges you back towards the dancefloor.
The Talk Talk-inspired ‘Garden’ features the contribution of Valentina Magaletti, one of the finest drummers playing in the world today. Known for her work alongside Nicolas Jaar, Thurston Moore and as part of the band Vanishing Twin, Magaletti’s sensitive, hyper-detailed percussion blends with Aslan’s elgaic synthesized atmosphere to paint a picture of a mysterious oasis.
At the LP’s conclusion, Aslan loops both musically and thematically back to the philosophical crux of ‘The Sun Is Parallel’, ending with the humane glitch of ‘Everyone Is Also You’. It’s a hopeful note, recalling another of the thoughtful vocal samples buried within Aslan’s evocative and hopeful creations. “In a way, the world is a huge musical composition, going on all the time, without a beginning, and presumably, without an ending”, considers Canadian composer & environmentalist R. Murray Schaefer on ‘Private Soundscape’. “We can improve it or we can destroy it… That’s all up to us.”
This album is up there with our favourite releases of the year so far, the influences and range is so diverse, a must buy in our opinion. Grab your copy here.