Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS042
Istanbul’s forlorn shoegaze spirit Ekin Fil returns to haunt our waking life with Ghosts Inside, the 2nd late night bloom in her fruitful relationship with San Francisco’s Helen Scarsdale Agency after Being Near [2016].
It arguably contains the most assured bedroom pop songwriting and elusive, shadow-chasing production to be found in her cultishly admired catalogue of the past decade, and, just like the work of comparable artist, Grouper, maintains an ever crucial temporal and metaphysical bridge between the original ethereal craft of Cranes, Cocteau Twins and Slowdive and the modern day for those who need it.
It would take some kind of glossolalic deciphering device to work out what Ekin is singing, but that’s really not the point, as her gauzy lilt conveys something practically, literally ineffable that transcends prosaic meaning and works with a plasmic, osmotic effect that really gets in the pores, perfusing your system with an efficacy worthy of the album’s title. In Ekin’s hand, or at her feet, an array of guitar pedals becomes her scrying diffusion prism, sublimating her sylvan piano, guitar, and vocals into something that by-passes language and deals instead in pure, yet elusive emotion.
While maybe not immediately apparent, this heavily introspective sound stems from the current socio-political upheaval Ekin and people of her generation are experiencing in Turkey right now, and we could say across the Middle East in general. It could therefore be heard as a numbing salve for “psychic distress, heartache and depression”, as the label puts it, perhaps offering a middle-distance focus that penetrates all the crap and finds a mutual, meditative point of audition and perception familiar to anyone sensitive to those issues, both within the region and far beyond. Which is probably why we’re just as rapt, here in a drizzly Manchester summer as the guys at her label in San Fran and, soon enough, other listeners across the globe.
There’s no doubt that Ghosts Inside is a masterful album, Ekin Fil’s definitive opus, no less.
There’s no doubt that Ghosts Inside is a masterful album, Ekin Fil’s definitive opus, no less.
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