Deli Kuvveti
In The Summer Dusk
POLAND SUBLIME RETREAT SR015 CD (2023)
Alias name for Derya Susman, a Turkish-born fellow living in Seattle just now, whose layered sound-art music is all new to us but has been active since 2021 and represented internationally with many cassette, CDR, and file-based releases.
Described, perhaps by himself, as a “time bender”, which may refer to his method of layering field recordings into multiple-exposure gestalts, as is common among many electro-acoustic and ambient droners, but I like it when it’s done with imagination and a sense of wonder, as we encounter here. To grasp the full picture of today’s release, we may need to hear Even After, which came out in 2021 on the Active Listeners Club label along with intriguing description “Distance as a source of meaning…meaning as a vehicle for experience”. For In The Summer Dusk, Kuvveti speaks of methods and techniques that are quite opaque to me, and the only part of it I can grasp is that he wanted to create “two distinct narratives” from his set-up. Though this may suggest two rivers flowing in different directions – or two armies going to war over a stretch of turf to which neither party can legitimately lay claim – the actual results are very subdued, rendered in soft-focus, inching along their prescribed route with the delicacy of a lightweight dragonfly in a miniature hovercraft. In its understated manner, the work even manages to suggest colours that we can’t actually see, and the warmth of a sun from another planet not our own.
The sleeve art by Rutger Zuydervelt may be aspiring, in visual terms, to some form of sympathetic alignment with the music, but it falls short with its blurred edges, its banal imagery, and its inappropriate colour range. Though it’s tempting to file this release in a wider ambient-glitch-drone + pastoral field recording mode, Deli Kuvveti comes close to achieving a higher degree of sublimation than many entries in such genres. A compelling, gentle beauty awaits you with these processed, lulling and wave-lapping sensations. (30/04/2024)