Film Composer Deniz Cuylan's Guitar Focused Album No Such Thing As Free Will

The memory is distant but distinct: Deniz Cuylan, five years old, early 1980s, at home in Istanbul, Turkey, listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on his parents' turntable. Those regal opening notes arise from nowhere and the music is instantly as real as daylight, refracting his imagination into a spectrum of unfamiliar sensations: grandeur, urgency, beauty, sorrow. Communion. 

He plays the Fifth over and over and over, perceiving the orchestra as a single instrument. It speaks to him in a language beyond words. This is it! This is the thing! The boy feels a feeling—like mystery combined with certainty—that cracks him wide open.  

Thirty-five years later, Cuylan is still chasing that feeling. The composer and multi-instrumentalist is older and wiser now but remains convinced that music is the most lucid articulation of the enduring contradictions of the human condition. 

The bulk of Free Will is built from classical guitar. This was Cuylan's very first instrument, which he learned to play at Lycée Saint-Joseph, the French high school he attended in Istanbul. Since that time his career and collaborations have taken him all over the world. He's lived and worked in Stockholm and New York City and toured the US and Europe with bands he fronted throughout the '00s. His post-jazz trio Maya played the Athens Biennale and wrote original music for fashion shows in Moscow and Dusseldorf. His electronic duo Portecho left revelers weeping on the dance floor and was hailed as a "fast rising band with a radiant future" by The New York Times. His world music ensemble Norrda comprised instrumentation from a half-dozen locales and played major festival stages across Europe and Turkey. All told he's released 10 albums spanning instrumentation, genres and continents. Cuylan's compositional genius is the common thead. 

Along the way Cuylan hosted his own freeform radio show on Istanbul's indie station Acik Radyo 94.9 for five years, worked as an editor at Turkish lifestyle magazine Bant, collaborated with illustrator Sadi Guran to publish the book/album Netame, produced a live album for Beck's sax player David Brown and composed music for megabrands like Nike, Lancome and Beats By Dre. 

In 2015 Cuylan relocated to Los Angeles to concentrate on film scoring. He's since worked on Netflix series Rise of Empires: Ottoman, the Emmy-nominated Mars Generation and El Chapo as well as Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize nominee Oh Lucy! and Janicza Bravo’s Rotterdam International Film Festival Big Screen Award nominee Lemon. In 2018 he co-wrote and scored his first feature, Av:The Hunt, one of the first Turkish movies acquired by Netflix International. That same year he and longtime partner Brian Bender began the production unit Bright and Guilty, which has been releasing cinematic, trip-hop-tinged singles on Jose James' Rainbow Blonde label. 

It was in LA that Cuylan stumbled onto the inspiration for his first solo album when he came across a Santos model classical guitar built by Pasadena-born, Paris-dwelling luthier Thomas Norwood at Guitar Salon International in Santa Monica. At first he couldn't bring himself to shell out the money for such a treasure, but eventually he decided that it was meant to be. His first studio forays with the Santos were frustrating, as if the guitar wouldn't accept his songwriting. Rather than forcing himself on it, Cuylan opened himself to the instrument, letting the Santos reveal its secrets to him. The result is a collaboration of the kind Cuylan seeks in all his projects, albeit this time with an inanimate object. 

One must clear their mind before they can fill it; "Clearing" opens the album as an aural palate cleanser. Without lyrics to guide the listener, song titles like "Purple Plains of Utopia" and "She Was Always Here" provide a sliver of narrative to these instrumental compositions, which include subtle accompaniment by Bender on cello and Cuylan himself on clarinet and piano. Closing the album, the title track packages all of the album's components into a delicately shifting finale, quiet, evocative, energizing, mesmerizing. 

And about the title? It too contains layers of depth. Cuylan explains: 

"My primary issue is heartbreak—the inherent, abstract heartbreak we all have. We're separated from something fundamental, and we're constantly disappointed in other people and in ourselves because of our separation. For religious people it might be separation from god. For secular people, separation from the womb. We feel like we're in control of our decisions, but it's actually heartbreak that compels the actions that we take in life."

No Such Thing as Free Will is perhaps an inversion o Beethoven's Fifth. It whispers where the other sings, suggesting communion with something greater rather than stating it outright. Yet somehow the feeling is there. ~ Jonathan Zwickel