White is the first duo recording by the guitarist Marc Sinan and the clarinettist Oğuz Büyükberber, and Sinan's third release for ECM Records. At its centre is Sinan's suite Upon Nothingness, built around field recordings made in 1916 of Armenian prisoners of war held in German detention camps. Those crackling voices, heard through guitar, clarinet and electronics, turn a chamber duo into a reflection on memory and loss.
The two met in Istanbul in 2009 and have worked together in many settings since. These include the larger ensemble of Sinan's Hasretim: Journey to Anatolia, released by ECM in 2013, and his music-theatre piece Komitas. They reached this music from opposite directions. Sinan, who has German, Turkish and Armenian roots, trained as a classical guitarist in the Western tradition before turning to improvisation and Turkish material. Büyükberber grew up around Turkish music, was self-taught at first and later studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory. Both are credited with electronics, and Büyükberber also plays bass clarinet. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in October 2016, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher.
The programme interleaves two cycles. Sinan's five Upon Nothingness pieces are named after colours, and four of them carry the voice of a different prisoner, each credited by name on the album. On Upon Nothingness, Yellow a chant-like song floats beneath heavily reverberated electric guitar. Büyükberber's There I-V moves between fully written passages, guided improvisation and free playing, and leans more on the dialogue of clarinet and guitar than on electronics. There III is for clarinet alone. The short Upon Nothingness, White, the only piece the two wrote together, is almost static, a few sounds suspended in space.
Reviewers stressed how far the record sits from any single genre. Robert Shore in Jazzwise found the recordings "densely textured and genre-defying", and Martin Longley in DownBeat noted some of Büyükberber's darkest, most mournful phrases on bass clarinet. John Garratt of PopMatters gave it eight out of ten in 2018, remarking on its sparest passages. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2019, Tyran Grillo called it "one of the most ghostly albums to be released on ECM in recent years".
This is the CD edition, ECM 2558, first released on 18 May 2018.
