Earthbound by Ipek Gorgun

From 2019 to 2022, Gorgun drafted the record twice, then deleted most of her sketches. By the time she opened a new session, she had gone through an accidental electrocution, a cancer diagnosis, and an allergic collapse that nearly suffocated her. During treatment, chemotherapy left her in a cognitive fog known as “chemo-brain,” forcing her to relearn the craft of composition from scratch.

While rebuilding her own focus, she watched her friends, relatives, and musical heroes battle illness, recover, or slip away. The result is ‘Earthbound’: a final, third iteration recorded in the quiet intervals between sunshine afternoons in the park, surgeries, funerals, long walks by the sea, emergency rooms, and snow-lit nights — above all, between days spent searching for sound and music. Yet, rather than foregrounding those ordeals, Gorgun surrendered to them, composing as a witness to the post-COVID world limping back to life in 'Janus'; to the wavedrops rejoining the sea in 'Cloudbreak Swell'; to a joyful stargazing experience in Moonbeams, to the attention-seeking power-drunk swagger in 'Edgelord'; to memory dissolving at the doorway — the doorway effect — in 'Olvido'; or to the way Middle-Eastern artists are ever more exotically consumed while their homelands splinter in 'Exocannibalism' and 'Bon Pour L’Orient'.

Artist statement:

“During treatment, I lost the very inner critic I used to rely on — and secretly longed to silence. So, this is probably some of my unconscious accumulation of musical memories coming to the surface. It would be oh-so-convenient to call this a 'survival album,' but it is not that, since there is no one to fight, nothing to win. I have only undergone some profound experiences and thankfully, returned with music. The rest is ineffable.
Each track carries its own story. Yet, the album’s core is simple: noticing each moment passing by while surrendering to being restricted by the earth, and witnessing the world as it is, without seeking transcendence for a change.

Ipek Gorgun is an electronic music composer and sound artist whose work drifts between sculptural noise and luminous melodicism.