kim ki o*

Ekin Sanaç: Synths, keys, vocals, beats
Berna Göl: Bass, vocals, beats


We started making music as the bass and synthesizer duo kim ki o in the summer of 2006. Our sound is based on playing every instrument live. We structure our songs with the hazy vocals, usually sung in Turkish on top of the monotonous beats we get out of a hip-hop style drum machine. We also use a cassette player occasionally to get our pre-recorded samples on tapes. We have played various shows around Turkey, Europe and UK. We have joined Swedish musician Jens Lekman on his European tour in 2008, did two Scandinavian Tours with Thulebasen and Eagle Boston in 2009. We have self-released two hand-made CD-Rs in 2007 and 2008 and our new album “Dans” was released as limited edition vinyl by the independent Dutch label Enfant Terrible in August 2010. (www.enfant-terrible.nl) In early 2011 we have toured Germany as the support act of the highly influential The Radio Dept. Then in April/May 2011 we did a 3 week tour of Europe and UK supporting the awesome Moon Duo.

Also in 2010, we collaborated with directors Merve Kayan and Zeynep Dadak on a short film/video project named “Elope” which is about the story of a sorrowful, half human and half donkey adolescent. During the journey he takes from the city into the nature, he is accompanied by his mother, his mother’s “morning coffee” friends, plastic birds, real horses and kim ki o… The 15 minute long film features no diaologues, but only kim ki o songs. Our two videos are extracts from this project. The first video is for the song “Kapali Kapali Kapali” from our first home made CD-R “En Az Iki, En Fazla Sekiz” and the second video is for the song “Herkes Evine” which is featured on “Dans”. More collaborations with Merve and Zeynep will come in the near future.  

Our influences that made us dream of starting our own band go back to our teenage years. Those years were accompanied by old school punk rock, Nirvana, riot grrrl acts such as Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney and lo-fi pioneers and indie-rock of the 80’s and 90’s like Fugazi, Girls Against Boys, Beat Happening, Guided By Voices as well as British pop music with good taste. Then it got a little more complicated and came a lot of post-punk, new wave, synth pop as well as a lot of dub and reggae along with some electronic dance music tunes. Feel free to add some Baris Manço to the picture as well. You can hear a lot of these influences in our DJ set performances.

Currently we are working on new material to be recorded soon. We are quite excited about the new songs!

Also here are the other music stuff we are involved in:

Soft Gates
Soft Gates MySpace
Watch Soft Gates live

Oak
Oak webpage
Oak MySpace

*kim ki o means "who is that anyway?" in Turkish.

Photo: Aylin Güngör