Büyük Lüks

Departure

For the release date of this single album I happen to be in Ciudad Caucel in the beautiful state of Yucatán in Mexico. I left Buenos Aires three weeks ago, and decided to live my life traveling for a while. Constantly moving tends to make me happier, and more focused person. A backpack, a laptop, and a steady web-based freelancer job opportunity, are allowing me to launch this new and exciting adventure.

After laying down all the recording tracks for the latest Black Sea Storm release“Büyük Lüks”, I put my bass and my guitar along with other recording and non recording equipment in storage. Not knowing if and when I’ll be seeing my Fender Jazz Bass and my Stratocaster electric guitar again, made the moment of saying goodbye to my instruments a bit emotional. I really don’t care much about belongings, except for the ones that are allowing me to do what I love doing. I’ve been playing with the same bass guitar since the 90s. I played all Swoan and Channing Cope shows with the same instrument.

Following my Instinct

It had already been over eight months or so that a little voice inside of my head was telling me to not limit myself to a single city and go explore Latin America further. Initially I was planning on leaving Buenos Aires in March, but then the jam band opportunity came into the picture. Since I tend to be pretty weak when it comes to refusing opportunities to rock with other musicians, I had postponed the potentially never ending traveling project, to see if something interesting could come out of the jam band. After a total of 10 jam sessions that I absolutely loved being a part of, the band was no more. This situation left no room for any excuses. My time had come to leave the winter and Buenos Aires behind, and go elsewhere.

The Most Boring Aspect of the Most Exciting Thing on Earth

The sedentary aspect of rock n’ roll is probably the only part I truly dislike about it. In the early stages of my rock n’ roll adventure, I was already able to spot what for me is its greatest downside. In order for a band to have some sort of a career, three or more people need to live in the same city for several consecutive years. When you think about it, this is worst than marriage. At least when you are married, you only need to convince one person to move to a different place. With a band it can often be way more complicated.

Although Black Sea Storm in its early days was mostly designed to act like a laboratory, so I can increase my contribution to my main band Channing Cope, it ended up becoming an alternative to overcome challenges related to human resources in bands. With the solo approach, I was able to reduce the HR department to a minimum. Unfortunately for me, the sedentary aspect of rock n’ roll does not only limit itself to people, but also to gear and logistics. Despite the fact that I did a pretty good job at reducing my recording equipment to a minimum since the moment I moved for the second time to this side of the Atlantic ocean, a bass remains a bass and a guitar a guitar. It would be quite difficult to go on a low-budget trip across Latin America with an electric guitar, a bass, and minimal recording gear. Not impossible, but it would certainly be quite of a challenge in my current situation in terms of carrying extra weight around and attracting attention.

I am aiming to be as cost and weight effective as possible, at least in the initial stages of this new adventure. Once I get a hang of traveling on a permanent basis in Latin America, and experience in my flesh what it is really about, at one point I would like to add the recording component to the journey.

Towards the Light

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the new single album is called Büyük Lüks, which means “Great Luxury” in my native Turkish language. I initially wanted to call it Işığa Doğru, which translates in English as “Towards the Light”. The title idea came during a 10 day dry-fasting experience, when near the ending days of the fasting period, I started to experience a strange but highly enjoyable sensation. Each time I’d be looking at the sky, I’d find peace and I’d be able to escape for a moment from the challenges imposed by the healing crises, and the stressing factors of a big city like Buenos Aires which I tend to perceive as amplified when fasting . I did not know how to interpret this situation. It was like the skies were calling me. Since it was an enjoyable feeling to connect with the sky, I disregarded any negative connotation this could have, and I decided to read what I was feeling as a call for leaving Buenos Aires and aim to constantly chase the summer from now on.

Towards the Light became Great Luxury

Near the end of the creative process of song recording, I thought that the title “Işığa Doğru” sounded a little too good for it not to be taken already. I decided to do a google search to see if it had been used for a song before. Not only the title was already taken for an actual song, but it had also been used by Turkish religious and political groups in the past. This bad alignment of stars made me change the song title to “Great Luxury”. I had been carrying this latter orphan song title in my head since 2015. I always liked the actual title, but I did not have a song for it, and more importantly I had not defined what great luxury would mean to me.

From Defeats to Luxury

Today I do have a personal definition of the actual concept. To put it simply, the greatest luxury is for me to have the life I am living at this very moment. Not being attached to any location, not having to pay bills, constantly being able to move and discover new places, and to be able to generate income while traveling. This situation is probably the greatest luxury I could think of for myself at this moment of my life. None of this was planed, and I never really had the dream nor the goal of traveling around the world and become a digital nomad. My dream was more geared towards touring eight to ten months out of the the year with a band and stay an analog rocker until it will be physically impossible to ride in a van and rock the world. I would have never imagined that I would be living out of a backpack and constantly moving without rock ‘n roll being directly involved.

I guess failing consecutively at many things in my life lately, brought me here by accident. Paradoxically, this is a really good place to be. If I am not mistaken with this reference, Mao had a saying along the lines of…. “From defeat to defeat, the victory will be ours”. They also say, you need to fail three times before you actually succeed at something. In my situation, it feels more like I failed at three completely different things, to then succeed at a fourth totally unrelated thing to the previous failed attempts. It really does not make much sense to me as to the mechanics of how things played themselves out, but I totally embrace this precious gift from life. From now on, I decided to do everything I can to make this situation last, because this is pretty much all I have going on for myself at the moment. In a way it’s not much, at the same time, this situation makes me feel like the most privileged human being on earth.