Ipek Gorgun is an electronic music composer currently enrolled in the doctoral program of Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University's Center for Advanced Studies in Music. After graduating from Bilkent University with a degree in political science, she completed her Master's degree studies in philosophy at Galatasaray University. As one of the participants of the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014, she performed in Tokyo as an opening artist for Ryoji Ikeda's Test Pattern No: 6 and joined Otomo Yoshidide for a collective improvisation project. As a bass player and vocalist for projects and bands such as Bedroomdrunk and Vector Hugo between 2001-2013, she also performed in an opening gig for Jennifer Finch from L7 and Simon Scott from Slowdive, as well as performing live with David Brown from Brazzaville. She has released two EPs with Bedroomdrunk, entitled This is What Happened (2003) and Raw (2007). Besides group projects and solo performances, she also composed the soundtrack for the documentary Yok Anasinin Soyadi (Mrs. His Name) directed by Hande Cayir in 2012, portraying Turkish women's struggle for keeping their original surnames after marriage. Her debut album Aphelion was self-released in February, 2016. In 2017 she released a collaborative album from Halocline Trance, with Canadian producer Ceramic TL (aka Egyptrixx) entitled Perfect Lung. Aside from multiple performances following these albums, she also performed in Sonar Istanbul (2017), BBC Radio 3's "Open Ear" at LSO St. Luke's (2018) and opened for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Oggimusica Acousmonium with an electronic rework of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird (2018). Ipek Gorgun also practices performance, street, and abstract photography. She won the IPA honorable mention award in 2013-14 with her work entitled "Bubblegun Daydreamer" and in 2013, she worked as the advertisement photographer for Contemporary Istanbul Art fair.
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TO 128CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/7/2025
From 2019 to 2022, Gorgun drafted this 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."
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TO 106CD
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Ipek Gorgun's Ecce Homo explores the lighter and darker shades of the human psyche, behavior, and existence, and humanity's ability to create beauty and destruction. What lies in the essence of such complexity has become a core idea for the album, while Gorgun seeks to figure out if there is a true meaning to being human, and human being. Starting with "Neroli" as a human fascination with nature and finalizing with "To Cross Great Rivers"; a never-ending, hopeless dream of the mankind to conquer and control the world, the album reflects the contemplations of a spectator being exposed to the human civilization, and witnessing human activity, including his/her own. Trying to acquire a glimpse of the multiple layers of such narrative, the sound of the album aims to present a diversity of the sonic spectrum, with tracks varying between ambient and noisy landscapes. Ipek Gorgun is an electronic music composer currently enrolled in the doctoral program of Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University's Center for Advanced Studies in Music. After graduating from Bilkent University with a degree in political science, she completed her Master's degree studies in philosophy at Galatasaray University. As a bass player and vocalist for projects and bands such as Bedroomdrunk and Vector Hugo between 2001-2013, she also performed in an opening gig for Jennifer Finch from L7 and Simon Scott from Slowdive, as well as performing live with David Brown from Brazzaville. Besides group projects and solo performances, she also composed the soundtrack for the documentary Yok Anasinin Soyadi (Mrs. His Name) directed by Hande Cayir in 2012, portraying Turkish women's struggle for keeping their original surnames after marriage. Her debut album Aphelion was self-released in February, 2016. In 2017, she released a collaborative album from Halocline Trance, with Canadian producer Ceramic TL (aka Egyptrixx) entitled Perfect Lung (HTRA 007LP). Ipek Gorgun also practices performance, street, and abstract photography.
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