Spectreview: Deniz Cuylan – No Such Thing As Free Will

Released: March 19, 2020

Instrumental
(Classical Guitar)
(Ambient)

-GREY-

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Centered around the warmth of the classical guitar, Turkish composer Deniz Cuylan’s debut solo record thrums with a lush, deep-seated sense of melancholy. Years of sound work for television and movies have proven his ear for tunes that accompany the passage of life, and No Such Thing As Free Will feels similarly tapped into that pulse. As an instrumental record it feels less like a collection of dynamic compositions and more like a single ambient piece: one steeped in a steely, wizened resoluteness stemming from the inevitability of heartbreak.

It opens tentatively, Reich-like, with the delicate layering of “Clearing” and then gradually opens into emotive tributaries of arpeggiated chords. “Purple Plains of Utopia” is the outlier, its dense, dissonant plucks locked into an alien time signature as waves of sound surge alongside. Otherwise it’s the moody sevenths of the ghostly “She Was Always Here,” the bustling city streets of “Flaneurs in Hakone” and the pensive repetitions of “Object of Desire” collecting together like a bleak suite. Closing with a mesmerizing title track that drives the point home, No Such Thing As Free Will makes for a complex and beautiful set altogether, ideal for a deep dive inward.

Recommended for trees in motion.