ILHAN MIMAROGLU First Retrospective of the Turkish Electronic Pioneer World debut with an introduction by Alper Maral “Time has told in first person singular that I was born March 11, 1926 in Istanbul, Turkey; son of the eminent architect, Kemalettin, whom I have never known as he died when I was barely a year old.  He had wanted me to grow up with music. There was a phonograph in our house and a number of classical records. Those were my only toys. I was also hearing music that the environment was offering me, music that I regarded rather anodyne and began to say to myself that there ought to be more music than all that. Indeed there was.  First Jazz revealed itself to me, and then contemporary art music. My mother wanted me to go to the conservatory. I declined. They would teach me the wrong things there and I didn't know enough about music yet to tell what's wrong and what's not. Instead, law school. I couldn't have cared less about law anyway. But I learned one important thing there, that I should obey only laws I could have made myself. Then came the time for music education, as I knew enough about music to avoid the pitfalls. One learns best what one already knows. The first products of electronic music and/or musique concrète reached me in the early fifties. By that time I had established a reputation in Turkey as a writer and broadcaster on music. The Rockefeller Foundation heard about me and had me visit New York for a program of studies at Columbia University (primarily in musicology under Paul Henry Lang and composition under Douglas Moore). A few years later I returned to New York to establish residence and further my studies at Columbia with a program centred around electronic music as in the course of my first visit I had come into closer contact with the work in electronic music (tape music) conducted at Columbia University by Otto Luening and Vladamir Ussachevsky. For many years I worked in the studios of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. My primary mentor was Ussachevsky. I also had the occasion to work with Edgar Varese and Stefan Wolpe, among others. In the early 1970's I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition. In addition to my electronic and instrumental/vocal compositions, I wrote a number of books (on History of music, jazz, electronic music, plus a set of diaries, all published in Turkey). Even if I hadn't done anything else, having written (and published) my ‘Project Utopia’ pamphlet, I would have regarded my existence justified." Ilhan Mimaroglu SOQRMOM (Pieter Snapper) electronics Istanbul, US Premier insan/damat (2008) (human/bridegroom) for live electronics and video, video by Reuben de Lautour ”As an American who has settled more-or-less permanently in Istanbul, I face most of the issues common to immigrants everywhere regarding integration into the local culture. This is not a huge burden in Istanbul, as there is a clear – though problematic – place for foreign workers in this city. However, when I married a Turkish woman (who incidentally grew up in Köln as the daughter of a Turkish Gastarbeiter), I needed to be accepted by her family’s home village in Thrace as suitable for one of their girls. In the village, there was no predefined role for the foreigner. Neither were there overt prejudices (positive or negative), and while I could convince them of my sincerity, I remained quite unknowable and unapproachable. In Trakya, one of the only socially acceptable ways for strangers to interact is on the dance floor at weddings, and it was only by repeatedly and enthusiastically (and at first embarrassingly) throwing myself into Turkish/Thracian traditional wedding dances that I was able to break the ice with the locals. As I gradually learned the rhythms (and more importantly the counter-accents), the dances became emblematic of my process of finding my place in Turkish culture, and the rhythms worked their way into my music. insan/damat is a sonic exploration of Turkish, especially Thracian, wedding dance music, and of being a groom  struggling to keep up with the associated rituals and expectations in a foreign culture. The title comes from the Daft Punk HUMAN/ROBOT dialectic after a recurring dream that the helmeted duo were in fact performing their take on Thracian wedding music at my own wedding.” Pieter Snapper Pieter Snapper is an American composer, sound engineer, and music producer living and working in Istanbul for the past 9 years. He studied composition with Andrew Imbrie and Edwin Dugger at the University of California, Berkeley, and with Ralph Shapey and Howard Sandroff at the University of Chicago. His compositions have been performed widely and have garnered awards and commissions from BMI, ASCAP, UC Berkeley, the Yamaha Corporation of America, and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University. Previously on the faculty of the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Snapper was one of the original founding faculty members of MIAM (Center for Advanced Music Research) at Istanbul Technical University. There he founded and directs the MIAM Studios, one of the most important recording and electro-acoustic composition facilities in Turkey. Snapper's recent musical output has moved beyond orchestral and experimental realms into live laptop performances that span the spectrum from noise collage to electro-clash. Behind the laptop he performs under the name Soqrmom.