The interesting connections between shoegaze and “Shoedrift”, the recent release that one-man band Sifir (aka Zafer Aracagok), hailing from Istanbul, deployed on the excellent Mille Plateaux catalog after having pushed many electronic/experimental releases in many countries all over the planet, as well as his likewise deep connection with Deleuzian philosophy (according to the release notes regarding “Shoedrift”, his music finds its point of departure from what he defines as “desonance” both theoretically and musically), inspired the conversation you can read below and made me suggest deepening the knowledge of not only musical but also visual and philosophical works featuring Sifir imprint.
Chain D.L.K.: Hi Zafer / SIFIR! How are you doing?
Sifir: Hey many thanks, I am doing fine. Actually, I am utterly content that my current album, SHOEDRIFT has been recently released by Force Inc. / Mille Plateaux.
Chain D.L.K.: First of all, I’d like to let you shake our readers’ hands! How would you introduce yourself in your own words?
Sifir: Hello everyone, I am SIFIR (namely, Zafer Aracagk) from Istanbul who have released electronic/experimental albums and pieces in Turkey, UK, Italy, France, USA, and Germany. My music finds its point of departure in what I defined as “desonance” both theoretically and musically. Sometimes I collaborate with other musicians to decompose together the sounds and vocals towards the end of a more liberating act of listening.
SHOEDRIFT is my 10th album, and my most notable previous works are tracks like “Desonance” and “Animot: Amourtalit mon Frottage” which I made for Mille Plateaux compilations, Ultrablack of Music I & II; and the album Chaos Variation VII which I made together with Obsolete Capitalism and which is released and distributed by Rizosfera in Italy and Rough Trade in UK.
I am also an author of books of art, literature but basically of philosophy under the guidance of philosphers like Gille Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Guy Debord, Situationists and Tiqqun. For example, I Want to be a Suicide Bomber (Little Black Cart Books, San Francisco); Atopological Trilogy: Deleuze and Guattari, Punctum Books, New York); and Non-Conceptual Negativity: Damaged Reflections on Turkey, Punctum Books, New York).
Chain D.L.K.: Do you remember the early stages of your involvement in music?
Sifir: Yes, of course, I remember. The earliest moment – which comes back to me in dreams – was the one when I was still unborn, only a foetus in my mother’s womb, and I was hearing the rhythm and melody of the bleating of a sheep and thinking at the same time I would be sacrificed as soon as I am born – just as in the story of Moses and his son. Probably this is why all throughout my life I’ve been always on the side of those who resist, protest and criticize the repressive state apparatuses who are against life, human, and animal rights both politically and philosophically, and yes, artistically. As a teenager I was most interested in protest music such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young etc. I would spend hours on end playing their songs on the guitar. When you compare this with the kind of music I am involved in right now, they are worlds apart, but still I am convinced that I owe them a lot, especially in the sense of a musical and textual “bildung” where anarchy plays a major role.
Later on, there came a phase when I was involved in classical music for about 7 years – a period during which I learned about more complicated ways of composing music and experimenting with sound and noise. During this stage I would be mostly listening to Schubert, Mahler and Brahms whose moves I would electronically maintain much later in my albums like I Want to be a Suicide Bomber (White Label Music, UK) and Chaos Variation VII which I’ve already mentioned. Yet of course, during those times Punk and noise music were my closest friends, trying to find distant echoes of non-rhythm, or “rhuthmos” in life and in the act of hearing if you like.
Chain D.L.K.: I read of your impressive teaching, educational and philosophical activity. As I see a certain prominence of Situationist in your philosophical searches, I remember that I read (maybe in an essay I read some years ago) that Deleuze considered music as one of the main ways to “broaden philosophy”. How does it affect your sonic search? Would you say that your music mirrors that idea by Deleuze?
Sifir: Yes, that’s true – for a long period of time I taught continental philosophy and art theory to university students both in Turkey and abroad. Thank you for bringing up the question of philosophy which is an immanent space for me encompassing my productions in art, thought, and sound. However, the legislative force of image and text sometimes makes them less playful than sound or music for me. Or rather, I should say there are things which I cannot pursue in writing such as drifting from noise to voice or from sound to noise or better, from form to formless and vice versa and at such instances composing and decomposing sonically comes to my rescue.
However, if you follow such a route in music production, your work – as it has been the case for my previous works – is bound to be classified as “demanding”. Without doubt, such a position or to insist on such a position does not mean that what you make with sound should be quite incomprehensible or unlistenable, but there are some intricate ways or rather negotiations by means of which you can more comprehensibly point to the sense of “drift” in question. I love this expression, “point to”, because it gives you the possibility of mentioning something without actually substantializing it. These are the possible motivations behind my recent album SHOEDRIFT where I tried to make sense by concentrating more on experientiality rather than experimentality, or rather finding a shoe-gazing balance between the two. By the way, with the former, I mean an artwork that addresses the intellect and with the latter an artwork that addresses the senses and the body.
Now I guess it should be clear by now that Deleuzian thought or basically philosophy and my act of philosophizing work behind all my creations. To be honest, when I stop writing philosophy or creating visually, I turn to sound as a black hole to broaden thought or achieve what I cannot do with images and text.
Another philosophical and also psychoanalytical influence that breathes behind SHOEDRIFT is my interest in Situationist thought and Somnambulism. Some years ago I coined the term Somnambulist Situationists that I developed in my book section “Clinical and Critical Perversion” in my book Atopological Trilogy: Deleuze and Guattari. Without a doubt, I cannot go into detail of my theorization here given the limited space of this interview, but what I basically intended in this essay was to open up a radical way of being to cut across the growing tide of repression and exploitation exerted on us by global liberal economies and the ensuing politics. Somnambulist Situationists or Sleepwalking Situationists is a critical tool for me, especially due to its rejection of role playing, mimesis, metaphysical voice dictating what you should do, or anything which passes itself off as rigid external reality. Pure negativity, in other words!
And hence the structure of SHOEDRIFT: If you listen to the tracks in order, you are supposed to realize that it starts with a rather gloomy, dark, pessimistic outlook on life, which develops into a more cheerful resolution in the end with Sleepwalkers where even such binaries like pessimism and optimism become useless when the sleepwalkers of the world unite, and they put their feet in the door, short-circuiting the things of the world.
Chain D.L.K.: Can you explain or define the concept of “desonance”?
Sifir: I must confess that it is a difficult subject, a concept which I coined from my extensive readings of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and about which I wrote an almost a hundred-page article in my book, Desonance: Desonating (with) Deleuze. In his book, The Logic of Sense, Deleuze quite often employs the concept of resonance so as to deny any simple synthesis between series in order not to fall into the traps of Hegelian dialectics.
Yet in a chapter called “The Passage from Noise to Voice”, he acts as if his problematization of Hegelian dialectics is left behind or forgotten, and he proposes that such a passage comes naturally to babies during their development to puberty (Melanie Klein). With my concept of “desonance”, I just wanted to problematize such passages and tried to raise the question of what if such passages do not occur; that is, what if the series instead of getting into resonance and thereby passing from noise to voice insists on staying on the passage with alternating moves between coming into being and going out of being, or rather vacillating between form and formless? It is this move, that is, vacillating continuously between noise and voice which I call “desonance”, foregrounding a tone of undecidability when it comes to the production of sound. Actually, this was a way of shooing away the Hegelian synthesis from Deleuzian philosophy. With my sound work “Desonance” which appeared in a couple of releases, I wanted to point to what I meant theoretically.
However, as I should explain later, in SHOEDRIFT I employed a rather smoothened version of what I call “desonance”, and therefore I ended up differently from my earlier works, basically in the sense that here’s a nostalgic tone as far as the control of noise and a bit of a more careful elaboration of what-might-go-out-of-hand are concerned.
Chain D.L.K.: I’m not attending so many concerts since I don’t like to show a Nazi-like pass to do things, considering that I keep on having many doubts about the situation we are experiencing, but I keep on saying that the last concert of the ones I saw before this mess that really enthused me in recent years was performed by Slowdive in 2018. So your connection with Shoegazers aroused my curiosity. Would you say such a connection is somehow nostalgic? Or is it a process closer to Deleuzian “enculage”?
Sifir: Haha, “enculage” is the very right word here because the exhibition where I displayed my watercolor works in 2015 in Alan Istanbul was entitled Taking from Behind. On the other hand, Slowdive has always been a love bud.
I’ve always had a deep enthusiasm for the bands like My Bloody Valentine, Seefeel, Slowdive, Lush, you name it … bands defined in many ways the genre known as SHOEGAZE. What gravitated me towards this genre was basically the sense of drift achieved quite often by whining guitar layers shifting over each other, hypnotically repetitive rhythms, dreamy vocals as if echoing in depthless gothic sound chambers. This approach to music production, the outstanding examples of which were achieved especially by Seefeel (at least, for me), was a way of pointing to what is known as “rhuthmos” in Ancient Greece. The latter meant “a particular way of flowing where shape is in variation”. The reason why the ancients preferred to call it “shape” instead of “form” was hidden in the belief that while the latter signified a pre-given determination, the former denied such a determination and foregrounded a sense of flow which precedes our sense of rhythm understood as repetitive intervals of time, fixed, immobile forms. Such an approach, without doubt, put at stake the audibility of rhuthmos which at the same time opened it to the question of experience … whether “rhuthmos” can be experienced as such? Experimental or experiential? What guided me in my music production as far as my theorization and practice of what I defined as “desonance” is concerned was actually this way of understanding rhuthmos, that is, as something which can only be sensed (not understood) and therefore as that which can be put at work only in experiential ways. Although it seems like I am opposing experiential and experimental, such an opposition counts only when the latter stops short at presenting itself as a cognitive exercise defying the richness of sensual activity.
Now if we go back to SHOEDRIFT, what I aimed at on this album – in quasi contrast to what I’ve done until now – was to remix what are known as shoegaze, rock, punk and classical and many forms of music with dreams, sleepwalking, somnambulism and nightmarish lyrics to invent a novel way of pointing to “rhuthmos” which is not audible but which can be opened up to experientiality.
All the tracks on the album were decomposed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by me during those dire times of the pandemic when we were locked down in our homes. Sleepwalking or somnambulism in my opinion was not only one of the few ways of survival which I re-realised during those times but also a radical way of dissidence and emancipation by way of re-enacting “rhuthmos” in face of the rising tide of social and economic repressions and utter exploitation on a global scale. Without doubt, SHOEDRIFT as an experiential album cannot respond to all the maladies and suffering from contemporary life, yet it can at least point to what may come next without immersing into its black hole – floating aloof.
Chain D.L.K.: I found the choice of a title like Shoedrift is pretty witty, but can you tell us the reason for such a choice?
Sifir: The first part of the title, that is, “SHOE” has been obvious for me since from the start as it is clearly related to the shoegaze genre. But the reason for the second part, DRIFT, surfaced later with a comment from one of my former students. He said: “The album electrified me with a much heavier and dense load of sensuality, heavier than Scott Walker’s late mature period”. It then all of a sudden clicked in my mind! Yes, it must have been due to my deep enthusiasm for Scott Walker’s art, that I picked up “drift”, and it was a reference to his 2006 album The Drift. That was the unconscious part. Yet consciously speaking, I thought it was a good way of joining my interest in Somnambulist Situationism: walking on the one hand and somnambulating on the other, drifting along with shiftless pure negativity as against the voice that tells us everything is fine and “be positive”. “Sleepwalkers”, which is the last track on the album, should – in this sense – be understood as an achievement of somnambulism.
Chain D.L.K.: I noticed some similarities between the cover artworks of “Shoedrift” and “Ben Aptalm nk lym Ben lym nk Aptalm” (very interesting title… quite Socratic indeed!). Is there any fil rouge joining together to two releases?
Sifir: First I must give a brief info about the title of this album which dates back to 2005. It means, “I am Stupid Because I’m Dead, I’m Dead Because I’m Stupid” which was mumbled now and then by Nietzsche after his collapse in Turin. Historically speaking, Nietzsche left his hotel in Turin one day just to see across the street a man beating the horse of a cart with a whip. Suddenly depressed in face of this scene of violence, he hugged the beaten horse on the neck, and thereby he mentally collapsed and stayed in the same condition for ten years until his death.
I am glad you mentioned the visual resemblances with this and SHOEDRIFT, but I think if there are any, they are subliminal – that is, what started with Nietzsche’s collapse in my previous album came to a logical (do I prefer to be logical?) conclusion in my current work in the sense that the black hole cannot be maintained as such, but we always have the chance of traversing its periphery without necessarily falling into it.
Chain D.L.K.: Any word on the semantic chain of No… in “No Life”?
Sifir: “No Life” as the second track on the album denotes a pure negation of everything which comes to us as already negated. In the theoretical investigation in my book, Non-Conceptual Negativity, I argued that today, under late liberal capitalism, everything comes to us as negated, for example, if you are asking for life, freedom, or desire, what you are supposed to do is to negate what you are offered by authorities so that you can maintain the positive and enjoy the life. Such a move gives you a sense of satisfaction because you have rebelled against such negative forces but at the same time you have played into their hands. It is so because you have a limited force of negation as arranged by authorities. Therefore, pure negativity, that is the negation of whole life, with a non-conceptual negativity should be maintained. Perhaps, I should immediately add here that famous quotation from the German philosopher Adorno: “To negate a negation does not bring about its reversal. It proves, rather, that the negation was not negative enough”.
Chain D.L.K.: We’re orbiting around shoegaze, but I perceive a very strong influence of Trip hop classics, particularly in the track “Black Hole Floating” and “Dreams”? Any word on these awesome moments of Shoedrift?
Sifir: Ah yes, you are right, Trip hop has been another influence on me, especially in the 90s. Bands like Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky etc. with all the down-tempo modified our conception of sound and rhythm as if they created a new pill to slow down our heart pace to look at what happened between the beats now distanced from each other. In that sense, it wasn’t too difficult to comprehend their intention – at least after a time – that to perceive the pulsing of the veins underneath our skin that was a way of relating our ordinary sense of rhythm to a different organization of “lan vital” that presented itself as not-always-expectable. Yet on the other hand and not in full contrast to Trip-hop there were bands like Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, The Fall, personalities like Alan Vega, Mark E. Smith, Lydia Lunch, and surely Coil and Joy Division. The latter bunch of artists has always been straighter in the matters of expression, “in your face” type of anger and revolt – that is, if Trip-hop required a kind of control of blood flow to foreground the “unexpectable” in your veins, the latter walked around with already slitted veins and therefore left any expectation behind.
Now if I come to “Black Hole Floating”, “Dreams”, I would say in them, I employed a mixture of two attitudes I have just accounted for above.
Though it’s another matter I’d like to share with you a moment of gratification with you: DJ of Digital in Berlin, Dirk Markham, after he played “No Life” made the following comment: “If Mark E. Smith and Alan Vega had had a child …”
Chain D.L.K.: In the liner notes you’re described as a one-man band, but I see some collaborators, particularly for vocals. Besides Deleuze, that can’t be physically in a studio for obvious reasons (at least physically), any introduction to the people you invited to the mic?
Sifir: Well, I am a one-man-band as far as the playing and the arrangement of all the instruments, composition, decomposition, mixing and mastering of the tracks are concerned. I finish everything in my home studio and given the lock-down situation all around the world during the Covid-19 pandemic, I could only ask my friends for their contributions from a distance. We touched each other from a distance, as it were. Umur elikyay and Umut Yldrm are my closer friends with fluent French, so I asked them if they would like to contribute to the album with whispering voice recordings of the Deleuzian text on dreams. Deleuze was in the studio, but invisibly, so to speak. All because the album SHOEDRIFT came to existence, into being via a strong influence of his thought on me, a ghost reviving approach to being, existing as if all the voices of the universe are always around you if you have the ears to hear them, that is, in the form of a univocity of being. For god’s sake: what does it mean when Deleuze says that your life is fucked up once you appear in someone else’s dream? So, I had to scatter all those whispering from my friends to the tracks other than “Dreams” in order to maintain a fragmented unity. Actually, I know the answer to this question above, but I’d rather leave the answer to the listeners.
Ezgi Irem who appears in “Black Hole Floating” and “Sleepwalkers” is a phenomenal vocalist, a professional musician who contributed to the album with ground-breaking vocals. I must add that I only sent her the tracks with no guidance for vocal lines, and she turned up with amazing melody lines of her own. That was more than gratifying.
Mbeccel Aracagk who is my mum and 92 years old willingly accepted to add her own contribution to “Dreams” which appears towards the end of the track. A brave woman of experiences who started her searches in music with a mandolin when she was 7 years old.
Mehmet Ali Tal is also a close friend with awesome flute playing techniques, and he also appears in the second movement of “Dreams” with a distorted melody line.
Chain D.L.K.: What’s the role of music in current times?
Sifir: I’d rather not talk about the current times because there are too many types of music at present for which I do not have any respect, and which solely contribute to the worldwide hegemony of spreading supremacy of stupidity on all scales. Music is an intelligent phenomenon for me, who needs the response of intelligent people. By the way, I do not accuse people here for being unashamedly stupid but for not arming themselves with pure, non-conceptual negativity against stupidity. Yet I hope it doesn’t make me sound pessimistic as I admittedly believe in the following quote from Aki Kaurismaki: “When all the hope is gone, there is no reason for pessimism”. Of course, it doesn’t mean that one can demolish hope, but at least one can stop hoping positively.
Chain D.L.K.: Any work in progress?
Sifir: Yes, I do have a work in progress for Rizosfera / Obsolete Capitalism. It will comprise my individual tracks in Chaos Variation VII and some original tracks that I am working on these days. One day, I am negatively hoping to sing like Lydia Lunch in my version of The Beatles’ phenomenal piece, “Tomorrow Never Knows”.
Visit Sifir on the web:
https://www.sifiro.com/