Electronic Shadows: What are your musical influences, and why do you think you like them?

Tolga Gurpinar: I love Jean Michel Jarre and Bjork... I adore Bjork, because her music is full of love, and she is a master of having very gentle and very tough elements coexist in one piece of music. "Human techno, fearless electro people", say... And Jarre, because his music is so expressive...

And I love Norwagian classical composer Edvard Grieg and Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. The track Alive from the album Alive has definite influences from de Falla. And Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King is the influence for my very happy, electronic tune A Room Full Of Creatures from my album The Story Of Iloyd, for children.

Electronic Shadows: What are you trying to achieve in your music?

Tolga Gurpinar: I am more into the expression side of music, more than the entertainment side. I am into bringing out characters, images, behaviours, statements, allusions, jokes through music. And I want these points to be the attraction point of my work, not the beats, the sounds, etc... (although the expression is kept within them).

For example, what I wanted to do with my album The Story Of Iloyd was to bring out a music full of childish behaviours, mimics, grooves; thus remind the adults, the mentality of their childhood. We all need to look back how we were explorative, creative, brave, curious, genuine, dynamic and full of love when we were children; and think about what we become today.

The "Iloyd" project hasn't finished yet. This is actually just the beginning. I'll do two more versions of The Story Of Iloyd albums, one will be directly for children, and one will be for big kids!  :-)  The CD that is availble from MP3.com is a sketch version from 1998.

Turning back to subject "expression", I did composed the piece The Lonely Seagull Of The Deserted City as a half allusion half joke to Jarre's renowned Oxygenian seagulls, for example. And I have a quite groovy happy house tune in my francemp3.com page, ChewingGum. French people like this track very much, and they dance to it. But still, this piece has an expression of its own, for me... Maybe the expressions of "entertainment, dance, groove & happiness".

Electronic Shadows: Do you have any specific composing technique?

Tolga Gurpinar: I sometimes just wander among the keys, and do some imporvisations. But mostly, I have an idea, a concept, a feeling in my mind - linked with what I live - and sit and compose something around this concept and try to finish the track as soon as possible. But rarely I work on a piece more than a year. Alive for example... I had to work on this track for one and a half years because of the complexity of the harmonic elements. There are even some 20 minutes versions of the piece. Today only the best bits are there in the 3.30 minutes version. But one day I'll do an album around this Mediteranean theme.

Electronic Shadows: How is your studio set-up?

Tolga Gurpinar: I have a Roland JD-990 with a vintage card + JV80 with orchestral board, but anymore I do not use JV as a sound source, also not use JD much as well. Instead, I've started to use soft samplers and synths, extensively. Gigasampler is a perfect software sampler. It is 64 polyphonic and it lets you to work with more than 1 GB of sound set at simultaneously, as it does not use RAM to store the sounds. Instead, it uses the harddisk and capacity of the CPU and the cache. And one other great thing about software synthesis is Reaktor. Everything is possible with it if you have enough CPU power. It can reproduce any analogue, FM, digital synth; vocoders, FX processors, and it has some very new synthesis resources, too. I started to use AKAI Sample CD-Roms to use with Gigasampler.

Electronic Shadows: What do you prefer in a synth?

Tolga Gurpinar: Control, flexibility and trustablity. And the good thing is that this is what the electronic musical instruments industry is into, today, at last.

Electronic Shadows: Is analog better than digital?

Tolga Gurpinar: Not anymore I think. Anymore we have the control and we can almost reproduce the organic quality of analog, digitally. Also digital is always more trustable and precise. But the digital attitude of synth companies during 80's was a disaster, for sure; to build unpretty black boxes waiting Mr. Brain to come and program them, as musical instruments...

Electronic Shadows: What do you think of today's electronic music?

Tolga Gurpinar: Well, in my honest opinion, best electronic music today comes from other genres' musicians, more than people that are supposed to be electronic music composers. The problem is that people who are called electronic music artists are usually copying 70's electronic music; or Aphex Twin / Chemical Brothers likes doing something that I don't understand. I like happy electronic music or emotional electronic music. Don't usually like those "intellectual" or obscure music things.

But I like The Orb. Their music is something like "memory encoding", I say... I also like Talvin Singh and some works of William Orbit, etc. Even Kraftwerk is always cute, beside being very mechanic.

Electronic Shadows: What is your current album project?

Tolga Gurpinar: I've just finished the album Alive and I'll work on three projects this summer. One is the ambient / electronica version of The Story Of Iloyd, one is a completely new album, under one concept with transitions between the tracks or long, progressing tracks; and a happy dance album project with musician friend, Fokale. (I composed ChewingGum for this project.)

Electronic Shadows: Describe your latest album.

Tolga Gurpinar: Alive is a kind of romantic, orchestral but yet quite modern music album. More like a compilation album or a kind of soundtrack of a fragment from my life. Many tracks in it were composed directly with influences from my daily life, my friends, etc. But don't think that my life was ordinary during this period, first the great earthquake, the sun eclipse, my fall into a bog, and many more strange things.

And I just did the mastering of Iloyd's old recordings just after the 7,4 Izmit earthquake, which had shaken Istanbul well, too. And that is why the bass sounds in the mix is so low, because I couldn't hear a deep bass sound for a long time, after hearing the sound of the quake. (What a bad coinsidence that a 4 magnitude earthquake has occured in Istanbul a few minutes ago while doing this interview.)

Electronic Shadows: If you have any concert experience, what was it, and what do you feel about the live situation?

Tolga Gurpinar: Yes, once. It was a kind of music competition in one of the biggest concert halls in Istanbul. All the competitors, including me, were said to wait in a small room behind the stage, all together. And there was such a bad atmosphere there, both physically and socially that I totally forgot about the excitement and was waiting impatiently for my time to come, in order to escape. And when my time came, and I was on stage; it was such a good feeling to breathe the fresh air. I just did my playback and I couldn't see any face looking at me, already, because of the powerful spotlights. I didn't even realise that I was on stage.

Electronic Shadows: What do you think internet has done, and will do, to artists promoting and distributing their own music? And how will the music business look in the future?

Tolga Gurpinar: It hasn't done much yet, I think. But we have great hopes. The MP3.com idea is great. But most of the public either hasn't heard about this servise, or think MP3.com as an illegal pool of poor quality, gratis music. It may take sometime, but I am sure this is the future of distribution of music. One day there won't be a bussiness that gets the 95% of the money we pay to an album, and that controls all the music media.

Electronic Shadows: Do you have other influences in your music, beside other artists?

Tolga Gurpinar: Anything... Children, women, landscapes, pictures; even sometimes a smell, a noise, a fashion design. Beside all, love is my essential driving force to make music.

Electronic Shadows: Why do you think every person on earth has a relationship to music?

Tolga Gurpinar: Because, all is full of music! Well, we know that the story starts with prehistoric men discovering the rhythm for being able to move syncronically, during hunting... And then they decided that this thing was very amusing. Actually I believe that the power of music is its universality of emotions, regardless of the cultures, languages.

Electronic Shadows: What do you see for the future of electronic music?

Tolga Gurpinar: I think, there won't be a phrase like "electronic music" in the very close future; because today, most of the music is electronic, already.

Electronic Shadows: What do you do when you are not playing or listening to music?

Tolga Gurpinar: Thinking about music, these days...

Electronic Shadows: What is your favourite food, and colour?

Tolga Gurpinar: Spagetti, and yellow.

Electronic Shadows: If you were not doing music, what do you think you would be doing?

Tolga Gurpinar: Beside music I am already studying professional photography at MSU, and earning money by designing book covers, and drawing AutoCAD projects, and webdesign. But I would like to be a professional dancer...