Adem - Homesongs (2004) & Love And Other Planets (2006)

Bought in HMV in Reading; the first probably in 2006; the second most definitely so.

I won’t always lump together CDs by the same artist, but I will do so for Adem. This is in part because they were probably bought very close together, but mainly because my experience of one album is so intertwined with the other. His music came along at just the right time for me.

Over the past few years I’d been delving deep into electronica. The Beta Band, Warp records and Radiohead’s new direction with Kid A had led me to finally discard my adolescent prejudice that proper music was played solely on guitars, or at the very least by live musicians. But from 2003 onwards I’d started to explore old traditional British music. I wasn’t getting all purist about it (another adolescent indulgence that I’d done away with), but I think I was curious about how people entertained themselves with no access to records. Weirdly though, it was my friend David introducing me to the records of Tortoise and Fridge that led me to Adem.

Along with Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) and Sam Jeffers, Adem Ilhan plays in Fridge, a post-rock band speckled with electronica (I say ‘play’, in the present tense, but I think Fridge are sadly on a long hiatus). But on his own, Adem’s music is folky. There’s not a trace of the Tortoise influence at all. His debut, Homesongs, is a collection of pretty much that; it communicates an appropriate intimacy. Love And Other Planets is an album about space, but replaces the cliched bleepy-bloopies with pump organs, whistles, acoustic guitars and xylophones. We can lump the albums together and say that the overarching subject is the distance between people, or between ourselves and the world around us. How do we cope with that? And how do we express that? There’s a real warmth to the music; a genuine and unashamed attempt at cosiness and closeness that I really enjoy.

It is perhaps these qualities that have led me to inadvertently blabber in Adem’s face. I’ve seen Adem perform quite a few times, and after the shows I’ve often found myself face to face with him, talking nonsense. He seems such a nice man, mainly because he tends to stand there and smile, almost managing to obscure the expression of a man hoping that this little exchange is going to wrap up soon.

Since Love and Other Planets Adem has released another record with Fridge, The Sun (2007) and a solo covers album, Takes (2008). More recently he has played live with James Yorkston and collaborated with Megan Wyler. I’ve never heard of the latter, but I’m going to seek her out. It is the sort of discovery that I hope this project will throw up often.