EKIN FIL - Periferi

Ekin Fil delivers an album for these uncertain times of ours, yet it's precisely within that sense of precariousness that she seems to find her most fully realized stylistic signature: an elegant, ecstatic drone-pop that lays down tone-on-tone harmonic suggestions across vast, melancholy soundscapes. The record reflects, with transparent disenchantment, the everyday suffering of human beings, without moral judgment or any will to resolve weighty questions; the suspended atmosphere of these tracks conjures a sense of doubt and conveys the powerlessness one feels before desolate immensities.

As if she had by now fully absorbed the intimism of Maps (Helen Scarsdale, 2018) and the, in their own way, jagged unease of "Ghosts Inside" (Helen Scarsdale, 2017), the Turkish artist carries forward and refines the discourse begun with her previous Sleepwalkers (Helen Scarsdale, 2024) and "Bora Boreas" (DRONARIVM, 2025); she thins out the presence of piano and guitar, veiling them to the point of near-acousmatic abstraction, and chooses to rest every composition on a delicate ambient suite. Her ethereal voice emerges among echoes and reverberations, fragile and disoriented, resonating in a wintry solitude à la Bird of Passage.

The very brief "Vertigo", built on a liquid synth arpeggio barely disturbed by faint electronic textures, leads straight into the title track. "Periferi" is a delicate, dreamlike snowfall of sound, laden with nostalgia; piano and voice are quiet, shadowy forms that lose and regain volume like the natural ripples of a wave, submerged in a contemplative drone. "Hepsi Birde" sustains an Orientalizing chant over dark ambient progressions and tremulous resonances lost in the distance.

"Neonlar" and "Goz Kulak" exploit the full evocative power of scraping guitar feedback alongside a seething mass of delay, piano distortions and noise samples; the result is a deconstructed shoegaze that sharpens the desolate atmosphere before dissolving into the ethereal delicacy of the following "Werewolf" and "Ursa". The instruments finally fade away, trembling and echoing now from a great distance in a solitary, majestic setting, a sonic steppe unfurling endlessly through electronic textures and the faintest of vocal melodies.

An album shaped and coloured like Michelangelo's unfinished figures, those prisoners condemned to emerge only partially from the marble, never quite managing to fully define themselves, human concretion and formless matter of all things, turned toward and surrendered to a cruelty never questioned nor questionable.

Ekin Fil has managed to create a layered, plastic, ecstatic suspension, carving out, within the harshness and tragedy of human existence, forms of dizzying, uncontaminated lightness.

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01/05/2026