Ipek Gorgun

From 2019 to 2022, Gorgun drafted the record twice, then deleted most of her sketches. By the time she opened a new session, she had gone through an accidental electrocution, a cancer diagnosis, and an allergic collapse that nearly suffocated her. During treatment, chemotherapy left her in a cognitive fog known as "chemo-brain," forcing her to relearn the craft of composition from scratch. While rebuilding her own focus, she watched her friends, relatives, and musical heroes battle illness, recover, or slip away.

The result is 'Earthbound': a final, third iteration recorded in the quiet intervals between sunshine afternoons in the park, surgeries, funerals, long walks by the sea, emergency rooms, and snow-lit nights — above all, between days spent searching for sound and music. Yet, rather than foregrounding those ordeals, Gorgun surrendered to them, composing as a witness to the post-Covid world limping back to life in Janus; to the wavedrops rejoining the sea in Cloudbreak Swell; to a joyful stargazing experience in Moonbeams, to the attention-seeking power-drunk swagger in Edgelord; to memory dissolving at the doorway — the doorway effect — in Olvido; or to the way Middle-Eastern artists are ever more exotically consumed while their homelands splinter in Exocannibalism and Bon Pour L'Orient.