Sudden Beach – The Beast from Mehmet Guren on Vimeo.
Mehmet Guren is an Istanbul, Turkey-based musician, who despite the fact that he studied architecture, has spent the bulk of his time as a musician, songwriting and producer; in fact, he’s the founder member of Biz, a pioneering indie music band in his homeland that released two full-length album sin 2012 and 2015. Now, as I’ve mentioned over the years, I receive an extraordinary amount of emails from a variety of artists, bands, publicists, record labels and other folks from all over the world, and recently I received an email from Guren, who informed me that although his primary project Biz has over 10,000 Facebook fans and their videos have received well over 1 million views, his homeland currently isn’t a particularly friendly or generous environment for musicians and other artists — especially in light of the discord after the coup d’etat earlier this year.
Sudden Beach is Guren’s solo side project of sorts and as he explained to me by email, the music he has created with the project, evokes suddenly coming upon a beach while traveling on a desert road. The project’s first single “The Beast” reminds me quite a bit of John Carpenter‘s retro-futuristic soundtracks and Pink Floyd‘s “On The Run” as the single consists of layers of undulating synths, cascading shimmering synths and samples of children yelling and talking.
As Guren explains of the video, “To feed the feeling of the music I’ve created, I’ve manipulated the footage taken from the cult documentary Koyaanisqatsi, the pictures of empty buildings without any human. I’ve added some sounds from the amazing Stranger Things, like human breath or playing children to this unmanned atmosphere and tried to emphasize to the past and the memory; to the life before the buildings were demolished. “