"I Always Want to Tell Something Through My Music": A Conversation with Eda Er
A conversation with composer, improviser, and one half of äbädä — Eda Er. Interviewed in Berlin, June 2022, around the release of the duo's first album, I Am So Lost In Blue. Re-edited and republished by Nyxphere, 2026.
▶ Watch the original interview on YouTube
How would you describe your music?
That's a hard question for a composer, because describing something forces you to structure it — and then you feel obliged to keep doing it that way. So instead I'd rather describe my interests: why I compose.
I started composing almost by coincidence. I was always writing songs and imitating people, and one day a composition teacher saw one of my songs and asked how many years I'd been composing. I thought, "Am I composing?" I didn't even know what the word meant. I was making music — producing it — so I began on the computer, performing through those means, before I was writing anything down on paper.
Then I started learning how to orchestrate acoustic instruments. My question was: how can I write the kind of music I love in electronic music, but without using electronics? Around that time I discovered extended techniques and all the other ways of drawing sound out of acoustic instruments. That gave me another way to talk about my music — or about myself through music.
So now I have electronic music, which I produce, perform, and prepare entirely on my own; and acoustic music, which I compose for ensembles and soloists. For a long time those two practices ran separately, and I kept asking myself why I didn't combine them. I still ask that. When I compose on paper I don't feel obliged to add electronics — acoustic instruments already hold an enormous potential I don't fully understand yet, and I want to discover more in that direction.
I've been lucky to work with many enthusiastic ensembles. Beyond that, I'm an improviser, a performer, and a singer when I get the chance. I don't see music as a single art form — I see it as a whole: a performance, something narrative. I always have a concept; I always have something to say. So when you ask me to describe my compositions, I'd say I always want to tell something through my music. I often work with gender issues I've faced and personal experiences I've been carrying for years. It's a way of releasing what I otherwise couldn't.
How did you start in music?
I didn't start out knowing. In high school I was in theatre, and a role called for me to play guitar. I found one, taught myself a few chords, and started writing songs — I'd just been through a teenage breakup and was writing poems, so I set them to music with the limited chords I had. People started liking the songs and asking me to record them. This was the MP3 era; there was nowhere to really upload anything. I had friends who played other instruments, and we'd record together in small studios and burn CDs to hand out.
That's how I began, but I still wasn't seeing music as a future profession — it was more for fun. I was far more involved in theatre then. I really wanted to be an actress, and music was a kind of tool for that: you have to know how to make music, perform, dance, use your voice. I was building those tools. But in the end I enjoyed the music more.
In any art form, the things that influence you aren't only other musicians — the artists around you matter too. You walk into a gallery, see a painting, and it triggers an emotion that becomes something in your own work. Especially now, we draw on many things at once. I don't really think of composition as writing music anymore; you're producing a performance. You have to be aware that the performers' physical gestures are part of your story, your music. The other elements of the stage — light, movement, interaction — matter just as much. A lot of incredible composers are working with this now, and it's inspiring to follow my contemporaries.
On improvisation, Berlin, and being a musician first
I was invited to a Berlin improvisation festival to play a solo set alongside other wonderful acoustic musicians. At the end we all improvised together for fifteen minutes. It was a beautiful night.
I'm not sure it's harder to improvise with electronics. I started composing through improvisation in the first place. Even when I was making fixed-media pieces I improvised — I'd improvise sounds, listen back, keep the material I liked, and edit it later. I don't think there's a way of composing that doesn't pass through improvisation. Improvisation is composing too: listen back to the recording, and it's a composition.
Improvisation matters to me because it makes me feel free. I'm not bound to any tradition or to any requirement I have to fulfil. The premise is that you're improvising, so of course people can dislike it — but they can't judge you against a particular technique. It gives you a kind of freedom, a way of playing. It feels like a game, like being a kid with a toy. That same happiness, that same freedom, stays with me when I improvise.
I feel that I'm a musician — and I think feeling like a musician matters more than feeling like a composer. You never know how long you'll want to compose, but you'll be a musician at every stage of your life, because that's how you were formed. Being a composer does shape my improvising, though. People often ask, "Did you compose that?" after I improvise something — I think I care about form. Even mid-improvisation I'm thinking about form before I begin: what shape it will take. It's just a way of thinking.
On Berkeley and the Bay Area
Last August I moved to the California Bay Area to pursue my PhD in composition at UC Berkeley. It's been an interesting year. Culturally you have to adjust — to understand how people think and act, and why. It was challenging for a while, but at some point you start to get it: people think like this, these are the customs, this is what I should do.
At Berkeley I'm quite happy. My fellow composers there are genuinely talented, creative, inspiring people, and that's one of the best things about being there. The Bay Area is eye-opening in its own way — it's not like Europe; you have to find your own path. Maybe that's a more American way of thinking, I don't know. You have to go out, meet people, and pursue your interests yourself. So far the experience has been positive — except that the Bay Area is enormously expensive, which for a musician is its own challenge.
On meeting Simon Sieger, the pandemic, and the album
I met Simon in Berlin. He was playing a concert and I went as an audience member. He played several instruments in a jazz trio — really impressive. We talked about music, exchanged contacts, and later he reached out: he'd listened to my work and enjoyed it, and wanted to collaborate. I visited him in Marseille, where his friends live, and we talked through ideas. This was 2019. We thought: maybe we can make an album together. Just play, just improvise, and see what we like.
Then he came to Istanbul — I was living there at the time — and we recorded some music, three tracks I think. We felt it was going well and decided to make an album. The plan was to meet again in Berlin, play a show, and then have him come back to Istanbul to finish it. But as we all know, the pandemic happened, and everything was cancelled. He even tried to come, but France told him that if he travelled to Turkey he wouldn't be allowed back. So strange.
I told him: just send me an improvisation and I'll work on it, for fun. We'd more or less given up on the album. He sent me a beautiful, emotional tune. I sang over it, added some electronics, and sent it back. He said it sounded great. So we thought: maybe we can work like this — him in Marseille, me in Istanbul, sending material back and forth. In the end it would be improvised and composed at once.
The first track was called When the Rivers Meet the Sea — because we were each beside water in our own cities, and you look across and feel close to someone who isn't really there; it's another shore. There's a track like that on the album. The whole record took shape around this idea of trying to meet and never quite managing to. Lockdowns kept returning, I kept moving cities, it never worked out. So we decided: why not make the album about exactly that? We built the tracks one by one. If you read the titles, you'll understand why we named them the way we did.
In about six months we had a rough version. With the help of a sound-engineer friend we mixed it, and then Simon mixed and mastered it.
Let me explain I Am So Lost In Blue. When you listen to the music it's like red, black, white — I was seeing all these different colours. At the time I was trying to learn another language, bored in lockdown, thinking: okay, this is red; blue is interesting. When the Rivers Meet the Sea was about the sea, about water, and blue is the colour of water. I thought: I am so lost in blue. I keep counting the colours, but I keep reaching back to the blue each time, like a crazy woman. I improvised that verse and lyric while I was thinking it through, recorded it once, and barely changed it. That doesn't always happen, but that time it came easily.
I described this to a visual-artist friend. She loved how I was constructing things visually — we collaborate a lot, and she knows I have a very visual mind when I make music, which for a visual artist is gold, because they want that information. She made the video clip from what I described to her — from my craziness, basically. I love it. It's a beautiful piece, and one of my favourite tracks on the album.
Do you also make visuals?
I love visuals, and I often make them myself for my music — I draw and animate things, though not in a very polished way. It's more analogue: I'll record something on a phone, edit it, add some sound. I really enjoy making visuals by hand.
I know some Jitter work in Max/MSP, and I'm not against digital visuals at all, but I try to feel connected to the visuals I'm making rather than just generating them through software — though I'm experimenting with that too. I record a lot of little videos, use them as material, and transform them.
I'm a very visual person. Making music is visual for me, so I often end up working with images as a natural consequence. I love collaborating with visual artists and directors when I can. For years I composed for theatre and made pieces as a duo with visual-artist friends, and I learned an enormous amount from them. I enjoy working with video as an artist in general.
What is it like being a woman composer?
First of all, I'd rather not define myself as a woman composer — but I understand why the conversation keeps happening. There are few of us, and there are reasons for that. It isn't only that institutions don't admit enough students to these programmes; it starts much earlier, in how we're raised. Women aren't supported in the same way toward certain kinds of musicianship — conducting, composing. They're encouraged instead to be beautiful on stage, to perform, and not on every instrument. I think that has to change first, from when we're small.
I had no example of a woman composer in front of me where I grew up, which had both positive and negative effects. The positive: you can't measure yourself against someone else or set anyone up as an idol. You're alone, and maybe that pushes your creativity, because you have no limit. The negative: you don't know that you can become someone — that you can achieve things and be recognised in your field. I've been discouraged many times by men in the music business, and I still am. It isn't always spoken; sometimes it's blunt, and other times you simply feel that they don't want you there. Not everyone — but some people see you as a threat to their own work.
There's a belief I've heard more than once, so I think I can repeat it: "Oh, you're getting this because you're a woman, not because you're talented or hardworking — they need one or two women to show diversity." Maybe that's sometimes true and maybe it isn't, but it isn't my problem as a composer. If a festival programmes a couple of women to look diverse, that's not my problem either. I just try to make music like any other composer, regardless of gender — men, women, non-binary people, who face a great deal too, and I want to mention them as well.
This discouragement makes me more ambitious — not to prove anything to them, but to prove it to myself. You can do it; you don't need their encouragement. But you do need commissions, you do need support from somewhere. So it's a tricky situation.
Being a woman is hard everywhere, not only in music. Still, I'm lucky compared to many people I know — there's always someone better off and someone worse off. Yes, it's hard, but it's not something I can change about myself, so I'll go through it and hope for the best for the generations after me. As a millennial, I think we're setting examples right now — there are women composers today, and there are older generations I admire and follow.
My wish is that one day, when I'm their age and perhaps teaching, my class will be half and half — not two women and ten men, not one woman and the rest men. Then I'll see the change. I think it's about education early in life more than at university level. We have to show our children: you can do whatever you want; it's not about who you are, it's about what you want. Then the world will change.
I'm not very optimistic at the moment, given the political direction of the world. It isn't going well. But maybe we always have to keep hope — as artists, that's our duty. We have to set an example, to believe in utopian dreams, because a doctor or someone else can't necessarily do that. We have to, because it's our mission. That's what I believe; I feel I'm here to do this, to show something. That responsibility sometimes weighs on me. I can't just do something at random because I like it — though of course I have that right, and I do make music because I love it — but it always carries a meaning for someone else that I can't control. I'm a woman; I'm not European or American — I carry a lot of responsibility for minorities. So I hope that in the future I'll feel I did my best. That's my own wish.
Which cities have shaped your music?
I'd start with Istanbul, because sadly, after the pandemic and the political pressure on artists and musicians, things there have gone really badly. It wasn't like this ten years ago — everything has changed. Artists are usually the first to be silenced in any society, because we talk a lot, and they don't want us to talk. There are still COVID restrictions placed on musicians specifically in Istanbul, and it's affecting how people survive there. I'm deeply concerned about the scene. I still have friends there and love performing with them, but I want to emphasise — as a Turkish musician I feel it's my duty to say — that things are not going well in Istanbul. Such a beautiful city; such a pitiful thing to watch happen.
As for California — it's so big. There are small gatherings and improvisation scenes, mostly in Oakland and some in San Francisco. But nowhere beats Berlin for a lively, welcoming music scene. Berlin is special. Every corner has gatherings and events that surprise the audience — musicians not just playing a genre but doing their own kind of music. It's impressive. The musicians I've met here are open to any kind of collaboration, which is wonderful for me. As I said, I draw inspiration from people; I need people in order to make music, otherwise it doesn't make sense to me. Berlin provides that — beautiful, highly skilled musicians with open minds. It's an education in itself just to play alongside them, just to be in the same room.
I've played in other European cities — Amsterdam, Antwerp, and more — and there are places I still haven't been. But for now, nobody really beats Berlin for a music scene.
What about streaming?
I don't fight the system anymore, because I don't think we can change it overnight — this horrible system we have now. Streaming, or releasing online, is really more for your publicity than for actually sharing your music. In this century you'll be forgotten if you're offline for a week, because people live inside their phones and computers. So as a musician you have to have a social-media presence, and I see the streaming platforms exactly like an Instagram account, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel — they're social-media accounts.
How to earn money from it, I don't know; I don't earn much. We should probably aim more at live performances, at concerts, because even big pop artists don't make their money from streaming. They make it from concerts, from advertising deals, from other things. Practically speaking, they don't earn from making music — they earn from being seen making music. So it's about image.
It's a horrible system because no one really seems to care anymore. But you have two options: stay outside the system, or go with the flow. Even as an experimental musician, people do still search for this kind of thing. I once found one of my tracks on Reddit — someone had written, "There's this crazy experimental musician, check this out." I was stunned. I'd uploaded it to YouTube years earlier; the link wasn't even public anymore, but that person had it. We don't know each other. I was called crazy, and I was happy about it.
So I think it's mostly about publicity right now — hoping a few people will discover you in that pool of millions of fragments of information. We should keep releasing, keep doing things, because that's how the algorithm works: you become more visible when someone types something in. That's my humble opinion — I don't really know the music business. But fighting it as an individual won't help or hurt me, so I'll go with the flow as long as I can. And if I ever get famous, I promise I'll speak up about it.
How is the world of music changing?
It's changing because the generations are changing — that's obvious. My generation is in our thirties now, and there's a new generation in their twenties making cool things. It shifts naturally; every decade brings something new, because new people appear. Is that positive or negative? I don't think the change is negative overall. Being introduced to new music, a new point of view — that's a positive thing.
For electronic music specifically, at least now when you tell people you do electronic music they understand something. Often they assume techno, but some people are starting to realise there's another kind of electroacoustic music too.
I also think we sometimes want people to understand what we do faster than they possibly can. They're under no obligation. They don't have to listen and say, "That's cool, I get it." They really don't. We care too much about our product sometimes. I try to detach from my music and see it as a product — that way, when a critique comes, I don't take it to heart, because it's about the product, not about me. It's just a piece of music. I don't think we should weigh it down with so much importance. Just make another; keep going. The most inspiring people in history were the ones who kept going. You know a few famous pieces by certain composers, but look at their catalogue and they wrote hundreds — and somewhere in there they found something.
We shouldn't dwell on what other people think. We should enjoy what we're doing and do it, if we really want to. In the end it will be something. It will be you. What's more beautiful than that? Why am I doing this? I think we all have an ego — a need to show ourselves, to say: hey, I exist, I'm here, see me. It's all for that. My only hope is that in ten years I can be more me, and confidently say: this is me. Purely me.
What do you watch and listen to?
Because I deal with a lot of serious things in my practice — I'm in a PhD programme — I listen to demanding music all the time. In daily life I prefer lighter things. I genuinely love pop music; I always have, not just now. I watch a lot of very corny comedy shows. I really want to be a light person outside of my practice, because when I watch something very good — an art film, say — I start analysing the concepts and what's behind it, and sometimes I just don't want to. I want to watch something completely silly and laugh, because I'm just a normal person.
I love cooking — it's one of my things. I have a pop playlist for it: I put it on, cook in peace, drink my wine. Sometimes a K-drama, that kind of thing. I try to empty my mind and enjoy my life. Being a musician is hard in that way, because your relationship with music isn't always about enjoying your time with it. So I try to keep those moments separate. When I want to enjoy myself, I don't restrict myself to anything.
Where can people listen to your music?
I'm pretty easy to find on most platforms. Type my name — Eda Er — into Google and you'll get Spotify, SoundCloud, the other platforms I'm on, and my personal social media. Those links are in the description below.
Thanks for watching and listening. If you made it all the way to the end of the interview, thank you — really. I hope to meet you again through music, somewhere else. Bye.
Interview & camera: Paul Clouvel. Recorded at betahaus Kreuzberg, Berlin. Original edit: Zoé Khan-Thibeault. Re-edit: Nyxphere, 2026. Original interview: youtube.com. Featured track: "I Am So Lost In Blue" by äbädä (Eda Er, Simon Sieger). All rights reserved for Nyxphere on behalf of Eda Er.
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