Tolga Baklacioglu

Being one of the key figures symbolizing Turkish techno, Tolga Baklacioglu is an artist pursing his musical journey in a steady-state flow, progresses, evolves, and challenges both in his studio and on stage. Besides being an associate professor in aeronautical engineering, he has been steadily building a body of work that explores the outer boundaries where techno and abstract textures merge and blur since a long time. Being a good listener from an early age, Tolga finally decided to make music at 17 and took up guitar and music harmony lessons. This led him to discover more sophisticated music genres like Jazz and Blues. He learned to play trumpet which saw him join a Blues band called "Harlot Money" at the time he was studying aerospace engineering at university. Continuously searching for innovation, he discovered electronic music and started to collect vinyl and began DJing at the clubs in Ankara in 2003, eventually gaining residency at the legendary club, The Club 20, a year later. As a producer, he has made his way in the architecture of creative and sophisticated minimalism in his early years, which then evolved into a noisy techno sound embracing frenzied percussions, unhinged rhythms pounding through a mess of jarring analogue bleeps and squelches, and bunker-dwelling dronescapes always inhabiting the darker end of the electronic music spectrum. In 2014, Tolga created a his own vinyl imprint, VENT, as a platform for his explorations and those of likeminded travelers within this sonic realm. VENT has featured some new and established talents including Stephanie Sykes, Insolate, Wallis, Cindy, and Arbiter supported by remixers as Rebekah, Samuel Kerridge, Anastasia Kristensen, Svreca, Dasha Rush, Cassegrain, Ryo Murakami, Julia Govor, Skirt, Zadig. Recently, Tolga has started making international collaborations and releasing albums with several artists including Dee Grinski (Moscow), MAYa (New York), Ezgi Irem Mutlu (Istanbul), Julia Ogun (Moscow), KLEFT (Glasgow). His collaborative Your Secret Face lp album with Dee Grinski has dispatched from crumbling power station cooling towers where each sound is caked with concrete, shrouded in a mesh of whirring mechanical sounds. On the other hand, Tolga and MAYa’s Kına double lp album is something of a slow burner but reveals itself as a wonderful distillation of their disparate approaches where MAYa's effortlessly cool vocals and delivery are energised by Tolga's relentless beats and abstract textures, which bridges Tolga's industrial and techno infused rhythms with MAYa's more evocative atmospheric work and her vocals pitched somewhere between Nico and Leslie Winer.