Premiere: Soreab – Siege Night

Music

The Baroque Sunburst co-founder explores the use of the Turkish lute on his self-released debut album.

A fresh breeze cut through the balmy heat, providing a moment’s respite from the blazing hot sun. It shone down on the coastline, which was covered with clusters of small white houses that stretched up the hillside; each one looking like a bright diamond studded across the sprawling landscape. There was so much to take in, from the bright blue sea which invited you in and the colourful streets to the sumptuous smells and the friendly faces greeting you at every turn…

The music that makes up Soreab’s debut album, Muğla’s Chronicles, first began in 2016. The first ideas came to be whilst the Baroque Sunburst Records co-founder was living in Bodrum in the Muğla Province of Turkey for six months. Taking a diaristic form, he traced a journey of discovery, new experiences and learning new things, imagined as if he were a child visiting the country for the very first time.

In lockdown he revisited the project with a fresh set of contemporary influences but retained those traditional influences that had been there at the outset. Primarily this is a Turkish lute, which plays a central role in the LP and features in every track, though Soreab manages to manipulate it in ways that work with the sounds he loves today, from UK techno, dub, leftfield bass and IDM.