Tufan Demir

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No particular order, no genre boundaries. Just the music I liked in 2022.

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No secret I love NIN's instrumentals. I recorded a remake of A Warm Place a while ago and I'm back for more. La Mer is my personal favorite Fragile-era track. While this song isn’t explicitly about peace and, in fact, Trent wrote this while being on the verge of committing suicide, it always brings me hope and serenity. It was the turn of the century; I borrowed the album from a friend and ended up home taping a cassette full of La Mer, so I can listen to it on repeat. That's how much I loved the tune. It was such a moment when I first heard the haunting piano sound, and then I was blown away by how different layers interact with each other within a very weird time signature. At first, I was planning to play the tune just on the piano for this video but decided to embrace the chaos and see where it would take me. Et quand le jour arrivé Map touné le ciel Et map touné la mer

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I heard this song for the first time in winter 1997. I didn't know Bowie and had never encountered any music like this at the time. The video was something you wouldn't see on MTV normally as it was quite weird (thanks to Floria Sigismondi). Also, I was fascinated with the instruments used and had hard time understanding them. What was that sound? How did they make it? Curiosity in mind, I started to look up and quickly discovered Goldie's Inner City Like (which is shortly revisited in this remake) and then the whole Drum and Bass thing. Soon, I realized that David Bowie brought an underground, youth movement to the realm of the mainstream and expressed his art through new territories of the sonic revolution, using the computer as an instrument. It was pretty mind-blowing at the time and still influences me today. 25 years later, I know what those sounds are and how to make them, so I wanted to recreate the song from start to finish. Most of the sounds were played with synthesizers and recorded live. The vocal is extracted from the original and I used a short sample from the original song here and there, but also sampled the tracks that were also sampled in the original. - DMS & Boneman X - Sweet Vibrations - Omni Trio - Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix) The snippet from Inner City Life is from Roni Size's Instant Remix. No guitars were used, but lots of drive and distortion to make synths like an electric guitar. RIP Bowie, you were magic and your musical genius will live on.

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I got a new delay pedal and was jamming with Good News' melody, quickly ended up recording the whole tune. RIP Mac Miller.

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If I needed to describe #minimal techno in one track, it would be Dexter by Villalobos. Perhaps his most emotion-filled cut, Dexter is an incredibly dark and eery track with hypnotic sounds. But it is also the reason I discovered FM synthesis, and since I have model:cycles I wanted to revisit the track and play around a bit.

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Live ambient improvisation that I recorded for lsb.tv cologne / NRWision

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Music for 18 Musicians is possibly the single most important album in my life for warping my perception of rhythm and composition. So it was inevitable that I would revisit this groundbreaking brilliant piece and I did :)

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Elektron Model:Cycles is a great groovebox and has great capabilities to create FM drum sounds. However, it also has some cool mono synth options which I think are underrated. Some people think you don't get meaningful changes to some knob turns but the fact is if you apply just small changes to certain parameters you can create nice sound textures. In this video, I tried to create some evolving pads, lush soundscapes, and rhythmic textures using only Model:Cycles and its melodic engines.

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Revisiting J Cole's Sideline Story, MPC One + Casio CDP-s350

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Underworld played such an important role in shaping electronic music, their iconic dance anthem 'Born Slippy .NUXX' came out 26 years ago. It was the breakout hit of the Trainspotting soundtrack, which helped lift Underworld and dance music firmly out onto mainstream culture. I was mesmerized by the echoing, celestial chords the moment I heard the track years ago and the atmosphere was unlike anything I had previously experienced. I was just trying to create a similar delay effect the other day, using these chords but ended up reconstructing the NUXX'. Shout out to Wighnomy Brothers as well, their Somewhere Over The Slippybergün inspired me to write the drums for the first part.

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David Lynch's revolutionary series Twin Peaks is inextricably linked to its iconic soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti. The theme depicts the tragic life and awful death of Laura Palmer. I love the strange dark synth sound of the soundtrack and tried to recreate the ominous atmosphere here. One of the anthems of the rave era, Moby's Go is built around string samples from Laura Palmer's Theme. I took the same approach and also used the same vocal samples Moby used in his track. The rest is improvisation. “We’re in the dark woods now and there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees. And there’s a moon out and there’s some animal sound in the background, and you can hear the hoot of an owl.” If you haven't seen it yet, make sure to check out Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer's Theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-eqgr_gn4k

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I love Nine Inch Nails, always have, but have to confess that I love their instrumentals a little bit more. Those emotional vast ambient soundscapes have been a huge impact on my musical interest. Originally from the album The Downward Spiral, “A Warm Place” which played a central role in the Reznor-curated soundtrack to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers is one of NIN’s greatest instrumentals. And I think it's the greatest, so I made a cover of it, well sort of.

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The track that defined Robert Miles' career, Children, was one of the biggest-selling dance music singles and made a huge impact in the mainstream when dance music had no major presence on the radio in the mid-'90s. No doubt that he shaped the aesthetic of trance music and managed to go fully mainstream with his “dream house” sound in his early years. However, his music knew no boundaries; he devoted his whole musical career to experimentation, taking this “dream house” sound in a dramatically different direction that no longer had the commercial appeal that made him a star name. Children was an international sensation and it was a bit cheesy actually, but it's one of the few tracks that would take me to a certain time instantly. So I wanted to pay a tribute. RIP Robert Miles 1969 2017

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Clubs were closed last year but there were still good house bangers, I put them on a playlist

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A timeless classic, the club anthem of our youth, maybe the most infectious house baselines ever recorded, possibly the most influential track in the house music circuits. I mashed different parts of the track for improvisation, added some randomness here and there, made quite a few mistakes, and then applied some studio wizardry to hide the mistakes. Let there be house!

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Snowing like a banshee now and I have the perfect playlist

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Once featured in Levi's ad commercial, Summer is one of the most celebrated post-rock tracks. It is also one of my favorite Mogwai tracks and I've been meaning to make an ambient version of it for a while. Here's me improvising live with a bunch of synths and fx processors.