A couple of weeks ago my SO started blasting her latest discovery, a Turkish singer-songwriter named Melike Şahin. Her style is rather unusal—it’s alternative, but it goes through arabesque vocals, 90s pop synths, and psychedelic lyrics. It’s… interesting.
Ever since I’ve heard the album though, I craved this another band I knew way back when. You see, they were a duo who released 3 songs on MySpace, and that was it. That’s all I had from them, ripped songs from MySpace. I couldn’t even remember their names. I couldn’t remember the names of their songs. I couldn’t remember lyrics even—not that it would help, because a search would definitely not yield any answers.
I needed to remember them, find their songs in my iTunes library, and figure out why this new album suddenly reminded me of this band.
I racked my brain to remember this band. Pieces started coming first, a bar of melody here, a few words from the lyrics there… and then, piece of a name of song—enough clue to search within iTunes.
There it was! The Self Project they called themselves. Elif Dikeç and Selimcan Sakar were their names.
I remembered that I reached out to them when I ran another music site, 13 years ago. I wanted to create a limited run of CDs and do a giveaway on the site, but ended up not doing due to laws and regulations around “cultural publications” in my country. It would’ve quadrupled the cost of producing the CDs, a cost I wasn’t willing to pay. And that was the end of it.
I did some online stalking to see where Elif and Selimcan ended up… First Selimcan, as he and I exchanged quite a few emails about publishing the CDs. He’s apparently in Germany now, working for a large digital consultancy. Good for him.
Then, Elif, whom I’d never talked to before. Her SoundCloud popped up, and it was amazing to see that 2 of the 3 songs were on there! Of course, the one I really wanted to share here wasn’t, but that happens all the time with these obscure bands.
A little more poking and prodding revealed her Instagram, and only a few posts down, I saw a familiar face… It was Melike Şahin. Went in to read the details—turns out, Elif co-wrote and produced the final song on Melike’s album!
She didn’t even do backing vocals, and somehow my background-listening revealed to me–to my subconscious–that there was something in common with this esoteric band from way back when.