SINEMIS - Farewell
Turkish producer Sine Buyuka elevates her recently minted solo project Sinemis to new heights with Farewell, a new album of elegant and elegiac electronica-imbibed techno that mourns the loss and devastation of the 2022 Turkiye-Syria earthquake.
“It was ordinary citizens helping people with their bare hands; digging into the rubble to save their relatives and neighbours,” Buyuka writes. On the ground, the Turkish government’s response to the event was described as “incompetent at best, malicious at worst.” It is even reported that they refused to send aid to municipalities under the governance of their political opposition. “It was fate, it was God’s will,” the Turkish people were told, in wilful ignorance of pardons awarded to government-approved building firms delivering unstable architecture.
Farewell represents Buyuka’s estrangement from her homeland, an experience no-one should have to endure. Responding to the unthinkable heartlessness exhibited by those in power, Buyuka firstly channelled her shock, outrage, anger, and grief into a single track, “It’s Not Fate, It’s You” - now the album opener - named in response to the above soundbite from Turkey’s premiership.
Shaking with raw emotional intensity, Farewell is at once a love-letter to the beautiful land that she once called home and a scathing indictment of the governing powers that have so harmed its own people, culture, and freedom. Within the album’s mesmerising synthesis, techno-inflected ecstasy, and heart wrenching pad washes is an acutely personal and potent story. And though it is crafted with electronic instrumentation, its heart is deliberately human.
“It’s Not Fate, It’s You” is a bleak and blackened opening statement. Drawing melodies and textures from traditional Turkish music, it conjures claustrophobic and cataclysmic destruction in fizzing and shimmering slo-mo. It is equal parts beauty and horror, wrapping itself around a pulsing bassline and tightening with every bar.
“How To Lose a Country” arpeggiates Levantine chord structures to snake through whispering and shaking washes of synthesis, sometimes swallowed by the clouds as if the earthquake’s dust devours, with noxious hunger, entire towns and cities of innocent bystanders. But occasionally it is allowed to shine, reminders that beneath the crushing ruin lays beauty.
Later, “Exit Democracy” was created in response to “how my country turned into a dictatorship, losing the fragile and imperfect but still functioning democracy it once had,” Buyuka explains. It is appropriately mournful, bubbling and popping in the kind of pitch-black murk that hides injustice and cruelty, but here yielding a glorious emotional expressiveness that reveals true hope.
Sinemis was most recently seen with 2022 album Dua, written following a life-threatening illness, and combining ancient Sufi music and the mythologies of the whirling dervishes with lush and sophisticated ambient-techno. The record received glowing praise from key publications and radio, and was followed by a remix EP featuring KMRU, Mabe Fratti, and Hüma Atku.
Sine Buyuka worked as a culture and arts journalist and hosted a radio show in her hometown Istanbul before moving to London in 2012. She runs the experimental / electronic label Injazero Records, hosts a monthly radio show on London-based Resonance Extra and is a professor of electronic music at Guildhall. Her mixes have been featured on Worldwide FM, Resonance FM, Open Lab, Subtempo, Soho Radio and NTS, and she has performed onstage with musicians such as James Heather, Midori Hirano, Chantal Michelle, Laila Sakini. Her remix collaborators include KMRU, Mabe Fratti, Eomac, Throwing Snow, Deena Abdelwahed, Tegh, Maral and others.
Biography
Sinemis is the new solo project of Circassian-Turkish producer Sine Buyuka, who gently combines the ancestral Sufi music of her homeland with sophisticated techno-inflected ambient-scapes and semi-modular sounds. Her first release was the single Medi in the Wind Layers compilation on 7K! in 2021 and she had a single included in the Piano Day compilation curated by Nils Frahm in 2023. Her first mini-album Dua was released on Injazero Records in November 2022, which is followed up with her debut full-length Farewell in 2 May 2025.
Sinemis has played and DJ’d at venues like Corsica, Iklectik, Elektrowerkz, Somerset House, St Matthias Church and is set to play at the Southbank Centre in April 2025. Her mixes have been featured on Worldwide FM, Resonance FM, Open Lab, Subtempo, Soho Radio and NTS, and she has performed onstage with musicians such as James Heather, Midori Hirano, Chantal Michelle, Laila Sakini. Her remix collaborators include KMRU, Mabe Fratti, Eomac, Throwing Snow, Deena Abdelwahed, Tegh, Maral and others. She has received previous support from outlets like BBC 6Music, Groove Mag, Clash, Dummy Mag, Orb Mag, Headphone Commute, the Wire, the Ransom Note, Foxy Digitalis and Electronic Sound…
