Mircan Kaya

Born in a mountain village in the Black Sea Region of Turkey, as the daughter of a Megrellian family who had migrated from Georgia, Mircan’s life is the main source of her passionate music. Her early childhood years passed in an exotic geography and her relationship with music started in those years when, captured by the sounds of nature around, she underwent a period of intense listening and was thought to be dumb. Ever since, Mircan has preferred silence, in order to conjure up the sounds of nature – of human voices, rivers and streams, the winds, leaves, fireflies, cicadas, cows, horses, wood fire, a rocking cradle, a crying baby, the sound rising from the milk beaten rhythmically in the earthenware pots to make butter and ayran, the sound of the deep darkness and silence, praise and prayers, the sound of ezan and psalms, of crying women singing psalms, the sound from the far mountains of the Megrellian women improvising ethnic vocals.... Mircan started singing very early, in infancy, preferring to sing adult songs, rather than those for babies and children. Singing with orchestras in wedding ceremonies gradually became an ordinary activity for her. At an early age, her singing of classical Turkish Music would produce smiles of surprise in her listeners. At twelve, Mircan went to the local music shop and bought the guitar she had chosen. She asked the owner of the shop, who was a music teacher, for guitar lessons. The first melody she tried to play was Aşık Veysel’s “Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım – I am on a road long and narrow.” By the time she was studying at Istanbul Nişantaşı Girl’s High School, she felt the need for songs that demanded more of her. At 16, having seen an ad on the door of the big music shop she used to walk past everyday, she took down the number of a Jewish guitar teacher, called him and said she would like to have lessons. Not long afterwards, the teacher took her to Tunel to buy a new guitar. To buy that brand new black jazz guitar, she had to sell the golden medal her father had given her for being the most successful student at school. Mircan’s songs became more colorful with her new guitar. At seventeen, she sang the first of her own songs. Probably because of her longstanding pen-friends, that first song was in English: ”I love you very much, I know impossible to touch” and “My village smells gently violates, oh my heart is burning...” When she started at university, she made the decision to graduate having read all the essential art and literature, learnt to play the guitar very well, reached an advance level of English and Arabic, walked all the roads in mind, and danced. So she worked hard in Classical Turkish Music Chorus, traditional folk dance, aesthetic gymnastics, library of British Cultural Center, university library, Consulate of Libya, a symphonic rock group....sleepless nights full of music.... She made her first real journey during these years – to Jordan, where she went with a scholarship given by the university. There, she found Petra , the mysterious desert atmosphere, the DeadSea. Her improvised murmurs along the path to Petra were to pave future roads. The night before her departure, she was invited onto the stage by the President of the University of Jordan , where she sang “Yesterday”, with her trembling fingers on a guitar produced from somewhere, wearing the Indian head band she was unable to give up in those years. She and her friends formed a rock band and wrote several songs, which they improvised to produce dozens of cassettes. The pianist had been educated in English Literature, and the drummer, in English Language and Literature, while the guitar player, who was a mechanical engineer and a painter, had also written songs using the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Gülten Akın, Metin Eloğlu and others. During this period, Mircan also studied with Ergüder Yoldaş, who, on first hearing her playing guitar and singing, decided he would be her manager. He tried to introduce her to the theater and music communities, but this group environment was a distraction, and interrupted the development of instrumental virtuosity – turning the act of playing guitar into an accompaniment while singing. Although it lasted more than six years, the group crashed without any product. Mircan was the mother of two children when she decided to do a masters degree in Earthquake Engineering, at the BoğaziçiUniversity. In the meantime, she was the key engineer of a French company which built the computer-based mathematical model of Istanbul ’s drinking water network. Then she was given three years of work and training with another French Company on advanced civil engineering technologies, during which she had a training session on Chevire Bridge in France. She has given papers at international conferences, and organized seminars on the technologies she works with. A passion for journeys, discovery and learning has been at the centre of Mircan’s life from her early childhood. Academically gifted, she has always seen the life of mind and body in unity. Mircan makes no distinction between art and science, and she is fully dedicated in her work, believing that creativity is not only for the arts. In the last three years, she has performed ethnic & traditional music. BIZIM NINNILER, an album of traditional lullabies, reflects her experience of motherhood. Her 2005 album KÜL brings a unique and beautiful sound to traditional songs in a musical journey through love, loss and pain, to peace and joy. Along with the songs by Neşet Ertaş, the album has songs from different regions of Anatolia , and a song performed with only human voices. The album ends with a peace song “Dunjaluje golem tý si” which means “The world and it’s people, you are great”, from Bosnia , a wounded nation. Released by KALAN MUSIC, KÜL was produced with the contribution of such masters of traditional music as Muammer Ketençoglu, Derya Türkan, Emin Ýgüs, Birol Topaloðlu. While recording the album, Mircan went to Algeria to make a three dimensional structural analysis for a treatment plant project where she worked as an engineer during the day, and a musician in the night. She currently works as the exclusive representative of a company which is a world-leader on seismic technologies. She travels frequently to Italy, where she often finds herself chatting with her Italian colleagues about Italian traditional music. She might be found accompanying the street musicians after presenting an engineering paper in the conference hall in Padova University. Her office desk is shared by publications on engineering and literature/philosophy/arts: Adorno, Sontag, Canetti, Sartre, Mahmud Dervish, Edward Said.... Mircan has turned her lack of formal musical education, and of any limiting precepts or proscriptions, to advantage. As a person with a passion for free improvisation, her desire is to create her own music with her own musical philosophy. All the back vocals in KÜL are improvised, added after all the recordings were done, without any planning or notation. Her next dream is to create a musical work produced collectively by the instinctive participation of all the musicians involved without any dictation. Her musical originality springs from her unique life journey from the particular Megrellian sub-identity, outward into general citizenship of the world. Mircan is intensely proud and grateful to have a gift by which she can lift the sub-identity to prominence through music. Discography Bizim Ninniler 2005 Kül 2005 Sala 2006 Kül & Ashes 2006 Numinosum 2007 Outim (Once Upon a Time in Mingrelia) Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.