ET: What is your new album «Borderline» about? What was your instrumental approach for the album? 

F: Borderline takes its title from the UK/Swiss film with the same title produced by Kenneth Macpherson in 1930. The tracks are excerpts from a concert we played alongside the film which was shown at the Stummfilm-Festival in Zürich. Stummfilm- Festival is probably my favorite festival in Zürich. Each year the films are chosen according to that yearʼs concept, and in our case the festivalʼs theme was love. However our film was not a romantic love story at all. On the contrary, Borderline builds around a forbidden interracial relationship and the tragedies it entails. Therefore the film was very central to the albumʼs concept. We performed as a collaboration project between Fezayafirar ( Melih Sarigöl on electronics & DIY percussive strings & field recordings, myself on modular electronics & e-bass ) and Luiz Rocha on clarinets. It is probably the album with the largest presence of acoustic instruments we have produced so far. The main idea was to setup the electronics, in particular the modular synth, as a sound generating basis to respond and improvise with the instruments. So all of the instruments used (clarinets, e-bass and strings) were connected in different ways to the synth and other electronic components, not only for processing their audio signals but rather to generate signals like gate and trigger, which were themselves processed live in different ways ( mainly wave shaping and clock processing ) to trigger various functions in the system. We set it up so that everyone could activate their instrumentsʼ signal paths as they liked using expression pedals. Like that, as we played we could mix in these sounds live with the raw instrumental sounds as well as sounds coming from other oscillators. 

ET: Tell us more about your cooperation with Luiz Rocha and your show at the Stummfilm-Festival? 

F: In the Fall of 2016, Melih and I joined the Multiversal festivals in Barcelona and Marseilles. Mutliversal is a constant series of non-profit events born in Berlin and based in Europe with the objective of facilitating encounters among musicians in different mostly independent spaces around Europe. Already in the first evening of the tour, I shared the stage with Luiz and we really liked what we played and also each other, and the next day we found a studio space in Barcelona to play a while more together. The Stummfilm-Festival was bound to happen in three weeks, where we as Fezayafirar were planned to perform with the film already. So we decided to invite Luiz as well, because we were really liking the music we played together in these two days in Barcelona. And that is how Luiz came to Zürich in three weeks time to play together at 2am in the morning to this dark film … Pablo and Martin from IOIC – the organizers of the festival – were very receptive to the idea to add Luiz to the line-up for the festival. So that probably adds to the spontaneous flavour of the entire album. Surely Pablo and Martin deserve a big thanks for letting this happen. After the festival, we continued collaborating with Luiz in concerts in Berlin and Istanbul.