Suat Soyyiğit is an architect and composer from Istanbul, and that shows in his writing. His instrumental album A Structure for Falling Light, released October 2nd on Yelkovan Plak, has seven pieces, each written about a place that stayed with him, and “Aperture” is the focus track. It is about a single opening in the roof of a closed concrete room, where one square of sky decides where the light falls. Soyyiğit describes it as guitar-led melodic metal and post-rock, built section by section, with its fullest passage arriving at 2:00, and he plays the lead electric and acoustic guitar himself. He says the composition, structure, melodies, and arrangement are his own, and that he used AI tools only to help build some supporting background layers.
Musically, this is a tight composition; there’s no flash and playing for the sake of playing. This is a focused arrangement, and melodically it’s an open-sounding song, like widening the aperture; it’s full of light, or perhaps this is the effect of the cover art on my brain. That’s the beauty of this genre and great executions of it like this is that it opens up vistas for reflection and introspection on ideas and staring at the sun’s rays as they come in through a window how and it falls on a space.
The other six pieces take in places like the stairwell of an old building, a narrow street in old Osaka in the rain, and a blind facade, and several titles come straight from an architect’s vocabulary, such as “Narrow Section” and “Blind Facade.” The album runs just over 26 minutes, and Soyyiğit places it alongside Toundra, Tides From Nebula and Long Distance Calling. He sums up the idea with a line from the album’s introduction: “We leave some places; the places do not leave us.”
