Snow by Mark O'Leary - Şenol Küçükyıldırım - Murat Çopur - Can Ömer Uygan

Mark O'Leary is probably Ireland's best known modern jazz/experimental guitarist, travelling around the globe and playing with local musicians. His music covers wide areas such as jazz fusion, experimental improvisational music and Nordic folk songs.

From "Snow" titled album with blue mountain, covered by snow on the cover one can expect Nordic airy jazz with folksy tunes, but that would be a mistake. O'Leary's "Snow" is based on Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's novel "Snow", a story about a journalist marooned in a small mountain area town, covered by snow. A story about personal freedom and herd brutality rules, so there is a lot of tension and drama in this album's music.

Recorded during the same Turkish sessions with local jazz trio as O'Leary's previous album, "Live In Istanbul", "Snow" sounds close to its predecessor. Terje Rypdal influenced slow, even lazy processed guitar sounds build ambient soundscapes, filled with ascetic percussion, bass and impressionistic touches of trumpet, scented by minimalist electronic effects. All six compositions sound more like one long soundtrack, full of silent sadness and tension.

Using the same dynamic structure formula as on the previous album - starting from a very laid back music and then increasing tension, sound and drama step by step, "Snow" demonstrates faster changes that makes it more alive and attractive. In combination with the nervous dark atmosphere this music is hardly a nice ambient-related lounge sound, more like the excellent soundtrack to a documentary from this tragedy's place.
Review by Snobb
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Snow Prose by Mark O'Leary
Ka walks the streets of Kars, dreaming of Ipek, he visits the local theatre and engages with the director, for this is the imposing edifice where he once nurtured his unrequited love of Ipek.
The mystic almost Sufi like experience he once encountered when he was immersed in Snow on his travails on the outskirts of Kars as he returned one winter from teacher training college.
Ka was an acolyte of Ray Bradbury, in this isolated outpost of an Islamic nation, his dreams were refulgent with reenactments of the essences, sense and sensibilities of the Bradbury aesthetic. The Oyez incantation by the orotund Muezzin from the spire guided him to the sanctuary and the terra firma of Kars. He was deracinated from Kars in his youth, his father was a tenured University Professor of philosophy and was on placement in Leipzig for a year, how Ka longed for the solitude of Kars, the ebb and flow of bucolic life. He enjoyed his proclivity as an apiarist, a guilty pleasure, the sweetening of his Turkish coffee with the honey produced by his very own apiary.
Ka would drink his coffee, and read Stanisław Lem and dream of interplanetary travel, the would take hookah, it had soporific properties, he was in a transcendental state, the Gaelic describe this animated state as, faoi draoicht; idir colaidh agus duiseacht, the elicitations from the vendors at the local markets airing their wares punctuated his trance like state. The Syncretism of Ka's love for Science fiction and his relish for the Famous Kyd and his Don Horatio. Ka was inveterate in his belief that Kyd had authored Hamlet.
Analepses apropos to the prose and precepts thereof had cultivated this archetypal purveyor of wisdom in the far northeastern outpost of Turkey. Ka had a penchant for the lapidary, he also had a lapis lazuli bequeath to him by his grandmother which he retained in chest in his loft, he coveted this and would contemplate it, he felt it had magical properties as the lambent candle illuminated.
His martinet disposition was an impediment to Ipek, she was more hoyden, Ka visited her ex Husband from time to time, they would imbibe on Peach brandy and commiserate with each other for cathartic effect, both felt exculpatory at Ipek's exeunt, Ka suddenly awakens and duly warms his cezve and places a measured tea spoon of honey in the porcelain kahve fincanı. Do Electric Sheep dream of androids?
Ka simultaneously picks up a copy of Ubik and sips his Turkish coffee, tomorrow he takes the train to Ankara for a teachers conference.

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