Ekin Fil - Ghosts Inside (2017)

It contains her most assured bedroom pop songwriting and most elusive, shadow-chasing productions, maintaining a crucial temporal and metaphysical bridge between the original ethereal craft of Cranes, Cocteau Twins and Slowdive and the modern day dronecraft and vocal layering Grouper has become so well loved for.

Her gauzy lilt conveys something practically, literally ineffable that transcends prosaic meaning and works with an osmotic effect that really gets in the pores, perfusing your system with an efficacy worthy of the album’s title. In Ekin’s hand, or at her feet, an array of guitar pedals become her scrying diffusion prism, sublimating her sylvan piano, guitar, and vocals into something that bypasses language and deals instead in pure emotion.

This heavily introspective sound stems from the current socio-political upheaval Ekin and people of her generation are experiencing in Turkey right now. It could therefore be heard as a numbing salve for “psychic distress, heartache and depression”, as the label puts it, perhaps offering a middle-distance focus that penetrates all the crap and finds a mutual, meditative point of audition and perception familiar to anyone sensitive to those issues, both within the region and far beyond.