Dekagon

Ten works of electronic music from a ten-year period: an ode to synthesis. Dekagon is a journey into Anıl Çamcı’s sonic worldmaking with each piece leveraging a different synthesis tool or technique from custom designs to timeless classics. As spectrum, dynamics, space, and time become continuous dimensions of musical articulation, Dekagon moves the listener between the physical reality of their listening environment and an implied universe grounded in sound. 

This movement between sonic spaces is shaped by Çamcı’s meticulous exploration of audio processing and synthesis. The opening piece, A Now Unknown is the outcome of forty performances with a Eurorack modular synthesizer carried out over the course of two years. The following piece, Yonder in Bedlam, was composed in its entirety using a Moog synthesizer. Temas is the result of live improvisations with a stochastic synthesizer designed by Çamcı. Then, the use of granular synthesis in Diegese is an homage to Çamcı’s former teacher Curtis Roads’ homage to his former teacher Morton Subotnick. With each piece,  the listener can either be immersed as part of the unfolding narrative or be situated as an onlooker that observes the implied universe of the piece. Either way, the listening experience is highly associated with visual imagery and imagination.

This album is also at the center of Çamcı’s book “The Cognitive Continuum of Electronic Music,” which was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 as part of their Music and Sound Studies series. The book chronicles a listening study conducted with four of the tracks in this album with eighty participants from around the world. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective towards auditory perception, it details the intricate relationship between electronic music and listeners.

The pieces in Dekagon were composed over the course of a decade in Istanbul, Santa Barbara, Ghent, Amsterdam, Chicago, and Ann Arbor. The album art was created by the composer. For more information about Dekagon, please visit anilcamci.com. 

Anıl Çamcı is a composer, multimedia artist, and professor of Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan. He explores the concept of worldmaking across a range of media from electronic music to virtual reality. His work has been featured internationally in leading symposia, including the International Computer Music Conference, the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Previously, he worked at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Lab and Istanbul Technical University's Center for Advanced Studies in Music, where he founded the Sonic Arts program.