Solar Plexus | Ilhan Ersahin’s Istanbul Sessions

A review of a 2018 release that I never got around to publishing. The latest Istanbul Sessions was released this weekend and I’m excited to go where the group takes us next; it sounds much warmer… A return to the sun after two unsettling years?

As 2018 pushed on I felt the time&space that Solar Plexus delivers coming closer.
With the world tailspinning the way it was …

The album — the fourth installment of Ilhan Ersahin’s Istanbul Sessions — suggests that the saxophonist called his closest collaborators together to record not a moment in time or history but a journey. Its sound is reactive and all action; you can tell the musicians are pressured to be forward-thinking and feeling rather than reflective, but they’ve had practice. Session mainstays Alp Ersonmez, Izzet Kizil, and Turgut Alp Bekoglu return on this record and are joined by Erik Truffaz, Nils Petter Molvaer, Ibrahim Maalouf, Dave Harrington, Art Tuncboyaciyan, Kenny Wollesen, Mauro Refosco, and Brandon Lewis, all of whom have helped establish the distinctive sound of nublu, Ersahin’s label and collective venues based in New York’s Lower East Side. As usual, they trust in their ability to resonate with each other, even when jettisoned into unknown territory.

Previous Istanbul Sessions are determinedly grounded.
Their rhythms elaborate on the simple action of our feet working the pavement. Our bodies in cities — scrabbling crosstown, slipping past each other and our vehicles, weaving in and out of infrastructure, shooting energy around — are clarified and wound together on these records. The initial Sessions had us ambling through a square in Istanbul alongside thousands of others, blinded but unbothered by evening sunlight as it bounced off the Danube and flicked our eyes, dazzling us into the nighttime. The (com)motion that sustains the early mornings and late nights of our metropolises is celebrated extensively, and songs like “Night Ride” massage our megacity dreams and reflexes.

Istanbul Underground in particular seems to have gathered the sounds of the masses: the music, movements, and voices that ricochet off neon when it stutters on at night … the sounds of millions rushing into exercised chaos. Most importantly, the album makes listeners feel like they are one of many, attuned to the multitude as they synchronise.

Solar Plexus heightens this feeling: the big picture expands, the collective presence becomes softer, less physical but still significant, like when you temporarily escape from a party onto the roof or into the street. You take a deep breath, look up, and shoot yourself into space for a moment, even though you’re surrounded by loud, laughing bodies.

Even though we’re told that the album is “inspired by the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Blade Runner,” and the music can be as dramatic as interstellar travel, I would hate to give into cliché and say these compositions have a cinematic quality.

That being said, scenes flash in my mind:
Coney Island’s Warriors catch their breath in a Naked Lunch New York. In this city, tense reclamation of the streets plays out while sinister political gestures pick at its spirit and infrastructure. Souls mournfully haunt bars and disused spaces …

Remember the final scene of The Warriors? When the gang is battered but triumphant, strolling down the beach at dawn? Imagine them walking into the sunrise instead, toward the water and a spacecraft that slowly rises from the Atlantic. They enter and take off, refusing to go home; pursuing more action they say, “Farewell to Earth”:

You hear the gears of the Sessions machine connecting then destabilizing… disconnecting then settling… finally pushing into a groove as they move through the atmosphere. It’s the uncontrolled but steady sound of the stomping human grind blending with gaseous, cosmic change. A clarion call (Ersahin’s saxophone) careens them toward the stars and a tremor (Harrington’s manipulations) reminds everyone onboard to prepare themselves.

The listener prepares themselves too: I can hear the Earth groaning in the background and my defenses go up every 15 seconds. Fear and unsettling unknowns are present, but the wild keys are an exciting frenzy as we say farewell …

Space is not as they expected.
It is even more intense. The view is gorgeous, and the pulsing pressures of insidious space and changing light are intoxicating. There is ecstatic… terror. The drums are the engines firing at full strength. They’ve arrived for the “Infinite Gathering” that is them and the stars and the spice and whatever else lies in a universe that sounds like Jodorowsky’s Dune.

And “Pris” marks their first transmission:
Erik Truffaz’s trumpet keens out (blowing a black hole bubble) into a scarily vast darkness — (punctuated by) a sharp intake of breath! — creating a space inside.
Space and Sound meld and battle tenderly in a galactic touch tunnel.
The bass drops us back into the diving bell — a warm casing for other sounds — the guitar helps them reverberate together — scratching the back of the universe.

Everyone plays/speaks a language of their own creation, together. I think of the golden records shot into the stars in the 70s to give the aliens a taste of Earth (“To the makers of music — all worlds, all times”) though it doesn’t seem to matter to the band whether they touch alien hearts and minds or are never heard again. Their music empowers them and the listener as they move forward… may, by collaging their aspirations and the stars, manifest a sign… not necessarily a sign of life, or safety, or danger, but an indication of a grand communion they can burst into and join in effortlessly. Through the cosmos Rumi teases and shouts:
There is a community of the spirit!
Join it! and feel the delight!
of walking in the noisy street!
and being the noise!

It is clear that the band comes in peace, and the cosmos open up to them graciously. Though, of course, there is turbulence… We edge in and out of melancholy, nervousness, hope, and delight as cold darkness is suddenly illuminated by the birth or death of a star, or the sonic vessel is jostled by a rush of… space wind.
All natural occurrences.
We breathe.

The rest of the album is immersed in a familiar contemplation and longing not unlike the feeling you get when riding the bus, looking out the window, witnessing the World and letting it stream into your senses — desperately wanting to ride forever alone-together in order to marinate in Life’s relentless, flowing energy. Simultaneously, you desire Home and want nothing more than to rush into the arms of your community. “Rachael & Rick” sinks you into this reflective mood. As I contemplate all that’s past and all that is to come another voice in my mind recites,
“The past is a painful,
the present, precarious,
but the future …
the future is free,”
a mythic quote from a dystopic comic book I picked up ages ago. It fits the vibe for an extraterrestrial exploration undertaken for no other reason than the momentum was there, the timing was right, and a “Sea of Stars” beckoned and inspired.

Back on Earth this record is a space log — something I listen to when I want to move at an otherworldly pace — not in a gossamer sort of way but with Power. I replay the transmission, let it ignite my soft machine, and strike out into the spaces we share to celebrate the spontaneity — the humanity — that tranforms our planet daily.