cemgüney

The only structure which permits of natural activity is one so flexible as not to be a structure; I write in order to hear; never do I hear and then write what I hear. Inspiration is not a special occasion.

“Silence”, Lectures and Writings by John Cage

Error is drawing a straight line between anticipation of what should happen and what actually happens. What actually happens is however in a total not linear situation and is responsible generally. Therefore error is a fiction, has no reality in fact. Errorless music is written by not giving a thought to cause and effect. Any other kind of music always has mistakes in it. In other words there is no split between spirit and matter. And to realize this one has only suddenly to awake to the fact. 

“Silence”, Lectures and Writings by John Cage

A Review of Praxis at Vital Weekly 642

The name Cem Güney sounds like a name I heard
before, but I have no idea when and where. He
hails from Turkey, where he taught himself how to
play the trumpet and he studied in California.
There he got interested in sound art and started
to play electronic music. That’s the basic stuff
I do understand of the press text. The rest is
too hard for me to comprehend. Lots about
language, voices, talk, spiritual learning and
more such things, but I must admit I have great
difficulty in finding out what this has to do
with the music he created using laptop, field
recordings and radio. It sounds all pretty decent
in terms of microsound, glitch and processed
field recordings, but I fail to see the relation
with language as such. What Güney does here is
alright, but there is nothing here that we
haven’t heard before. The glitches, hiss, loops,
twitter and tweak, it is very common ground. I
must say that Güney does a fine job in terms of
production and execution but doesn’t get the
price for the most original thing of the year.
(FdW) at VITAL WEEKLY 

Cem Güney: Puts Sound-Theories into "Praxis"

After years as a DJ and experimental Trumpet player, Cem Güney is entering a new phase of his colourful career by releasing his debut album on Portuguese label Cronica Electronica. Essentially a compendium of his sound work over the past two years, „Praxis“ collects nine pieces of delicate, otherwordly musique concrete within a web of astute impressions and imaginative associations. Güney has certainly injected a hearty dose of thought and conceptual brilliance into the album – a combination which has already led some to refer to him as one of the most interesting artists in his line of business. „I am beholden to the harmoniousness of two essential properties that maintains the forcefullness of a cognition space“, Cem summed up his aims for „Praxis“ in a concise and intellectually demanding ascription, „One, is a time-space continuum, stable in manner, having control over the undesired effects of duality and two, the synesthetic response, enrichining the transmutations from the abstract to the concrete. Synesthetic responses, via the many influences of sound contributes much as a motivational factor, and without the negative effects of duality-distractions so to speak-fluid impromtu motions (the essence of creation) can build up to constitute a language that becomes the basis of form. Praxis, is the experimentations of the various emergent forms, and its application into the concrete.“

Cronica Electronica have made available three complete tracks from „Praxis“ as a first appetizer. These show Cem Güney to be a man of subtle shadings and heartwarming quietude: If an undaunting degree of discretion and a high crackle factor sound like your thing, then this could just be your album. Headphones are certainly recommended to fully appreciate the still bazaar of „Factitious Phobia“, with its oriental chants, breaths of hiss and playful clicks, of the whispering psychedelic Raga of „Somewhere between the Middle“.

Other pieces deal with algorithmic composition, african phonemes, „the ancient spiritual art and science of inner transformation through sound and tone“ as well as the use of „vowel sounds in the human language“. Added together and stirred with an unshaking hand, these diverse stylistic elements create a dense carpet of wondrous warmth, which is as unspectacular on a first listen as it is profound and moving on closer inspection.

By Tobias Fischer, published 2008-08-18 at tokafi

“We(3) are the children of the 1980s, We are the first internet-pop-generation. We grew up with radical Michael Milken [The King of Junk Bonds] and mythical Michael Jackson [The King of Junk Pop]. Hans Bernhard is loaded with 10 years of internet & tech [digital cocaine], mass media hacking, underground techno, hardcore [illegal] drugs, rock&roll lifestyle and net.art jet set [etoy]. His neuronal networks and brain structures are similar to the global synthetic network he helped build up and maintained subversive activity within. And now they are “infected” by a manic-depression [WHO ICD-10, F31.1.] (1), both Hans Bernhard and The “Network” are infected by this structural disorder. Waves of mania and depression are running through the technical, social and economic structures. Contemporary high-tech societies deal with hardcore brains using bio-chemical “agents” to control the internal information flow, we call them psychotropic drugs. Hans Bernhard was legally sloshed by Zyprexa®, Temesta®, Dominal®, Depakine®, Neurotop® (4). But how can we treat a mentally ill global network?”