Arve Henriksen & Berke Can Özcan Duo
Hearing Arve Henriksen’s Sakuteiki (2001) and Chiaroscuro (2004) albums for the first time back in the days clearly helped change Berke’s musical ears forever. Then of course the huge “supersilent” catalogue was always there to listen and get even more inspired each time. He even convinced his ex-band mates from “Tamburada” and their label to go all together to Norway’s Athletic Sound studio in Halden to record their debut “fantastik” and go full analogue with the greatest Kai Andersen controlling the faders, a studio where Arve and his gang has been recording crazy music.
Between 2008 and 2010, Berke was improvising with his trio “bicycle day” alongside his band mates (Alican Okan & Onur Karagöz) from the Music programme of Bilgi University in Istanbul, always searching, staying away from the typical song structure, playing and recording in some of the darker underground venues of Istanbul like Peyote, basements of experimental record shops like Deform and some more artsy occasions like friend’s galleries and humid studios. All because of listening to a lot of “supersilent” perhaps.
Then came Berke’s more mainstream kind of band named “123” with a trilogy of CD/Books: Aksel, Arve, Anja: Aksel, the boy with ever-changing scarves goes on a journey led by a dead owl, Arve, the owner of the cabin in the woods is the conductor of nature and many other mysteries, Anja, the girl with the studio of beautiful sounds, the connecting dot of them all. While writing the story for this trilogy, Berke started to hear Arve Henriksen’s sound on the the track “Arve” for sure and he wanted to give it a shot attaching the mp3 file of the latest mixdown and sending it out to the man himself with an email, their first ever correspondence to be. Arve responded back with another mp3 which he played on top of the track which mesmerized all the members of 123. It was official: Arve gave his name to the album and his voice to the track which was eventually released 2010.
After the release a special show 123 + Arve Henriksen was invited to participate at the Istanbul Jazz Festival in July of 2011. But change of plans, due to very last minute medical reasons the show had to happen without Arve. Faith.
Back to more file exchanging between the two when the time came to release the “Full Moon Theory” by Big Beats Big Times in 2015 on the track “Black Dub” featuring Craig Santiago in which at the very beginning one can hear Kenny Wollesen’s voice saying: “It’s interesting, because we could play so quiet, I couldn't even believe how quiet we were playing, it makes a big big big difference man”. And right after samples by Arve come in like a bed of good, dark hope.
Five years passed and another chance of a live show occurred for the two, this time it was arranged to be an improvised duo concert at Istanbul’s Borusan Music House in 2020. And guess what? It did happen. Such a musical journey it was, full of surprises and good memories.
The day after the show Berke took Arve around the city, visiting Hagia Sofia and the old Town, after hearing the sound of the prayer you could see he was impressed. Taking the ferry from Karaköy to Kadıköy, Turkish tea and seagulls, Berke handed him a CD, one of his personal favorites of all time: Erkan Oğur’s “Bir Ömürlük Misafir” and the two agreed on working further on the material they recorded live the previous night and decided to take it to another level adding more sounds via more file exchanging over the net, the way they both liked it. During their time at a classic family tea garden in Moda they went deeper into topics like the art of improvisation, the mystery of the “ECM partner-shop” sticker on the windscreen of Berke’s car, music copyrights: who owns what in an improvised session when it comes to licensing, etc. And one more topic was on the table, Twin Rocks, a new album project Berke has been working on through the isolation days of the pandemic. He believed he was almost done with the A side of it and wanted Arve to give it a listen when he went back home, he said “sure thing”.
A few weeks went by and out of nowhere Berke received an email from Arve with a download link, it looked like Arve not just listened to Twin Rocks demo but also recorded over it. And truly, it sounded fantastic. On the other hand the duo concert material kept cooking, many rounds of file swapping happened and there it was another unnamed album to be. Although this new unnamed album was finished, life happened, other projects kept coming up and a release date, the title of the album, the label and even the artwork for the cover was never agreed on. So maybe it wasn’t finished after all.
Rolling back to Twin Rocks, it was the time to release: November 2023. And Berke had already booked a Twin Rocks live band show featuring almost all the amazing players of the album (Arve Henriksen, Jonah Parzen-Johnson, Ozan Tekin, Ozan Kısaparmak and himself) for November 2024 (exactly one year’s time after the actual release date!) in Istanbul’s Borusan Music House, where the two had met 4 years ago. When the booking was confirmed Berke was still living in Istanbul, but of course life happened again and in the first days of 2024 he got married in Abu Dhabi.
In November, Arve flew in from Sweden, Jonah from USA, Ozan T. from Germany, Berke from the UAE, Ozan K. was the only member of the band living in Istanbul at the time and finally the quintet met and started rehearsing for the show. The show was like a wedding, all friends and family united. So Arve surprised everybody by singing an improvised refrain that goes “Berke got married in Abu Dhabi”. Beautiful night, after party and laughter. By the way the show was well recorded so you can put it in the list of unreleased albums the two are a part of.
Arve and Berke were invited to play another improvised concert at “Show of Hands Festival” that took place in an art museum, Arter. The show was scheduled for April 26th of 2025. Berke wanted to fly in a few days earlier than the show date. That very same day he arrived, in Istanbul, an earthquake happened scaring many residents and the whole festival was drawn to the edge of being cancelled. Arter’s building was one of the safest places to be in a shaky atmosphere and after some discussions amongst the organising team (a collaboration of Hermes Records from Iran and A.K. Music from Turkey) it was decided to carry on with the plan and not cancel anything but Arve chose not to travel. Faith again.
The 4 day long SOH Festival had this concept of presenting one solo and one duo performance each evening. Hakon Kornstad was already signed for a solo set at the same festival. The closing night of the whole event was replanned and the festival team and Berke’s management decided that Berke could do the opening solo set himself and in the second half join forces with Hakon for an improvisation. Both sets worked out alright.
Just before Berke jumped onto the stage for his solo set an email from Arve appeared, he sent in 3 different sketches of new music suggesting Berke to use on his sampler, but Berke decided to save those files for later and that could be the starting point of their never released duo record’s B side for sure.