-by Elizabeth Spouse (Development Coordinator / Curator at Improper Walls)

Raven and Phan is an Austro-Turkish duo wreaking havoc in post-club and art-pop music. With their upcoming album “Room 167” they tell stories about friendship, coincidence and openness that go beyond geographical and cultural borders. Ever since Utku and Manuel met in the summer of 2014, they have been playing, writing, and producing music together. From 2015 to 2018 they had been living together in a shared flat, a circumstance which became the foundation for their creative process. With their dark sound, Raven and Phan are deeply rooted in electronic music. Alluding to many other genres, the duo creates a broad spectrum of cinematic, picturesque-artistic soundscapes, fusing conceptual ideas influenced by art-pop and club music.

MORE FROM AND ABOUT RAVEN AND PHAN

So, without further ado, meet Raven & Phan!

Utku & Manuel: Hi we’re Raven and Phan, and we’re playing an Improper Session.

I like that you refer to your music as “A sonic odyssey from the Bosporus to the Alps”. Do you feel that the places you’re each from and have lived has had an influence on this “wreaking havoc in post-club and art-pop music”? In what ways do you feel your music does this?

Utku: I think it is inevitable that when you have two people coming from different places you have some sort of cultural impact, because I was born and raised in Istanbul and Manuel in Vienna, Austria. I guess you have clubs in all the countries, in all the cities that are considered metropolitan areas, so we are accustomed to the feeling, but in our own way. I think our music was a good way to put it in the same context.

Manuel: Yeah, definitely it has an impact on our music and how we merge those influences together.

You say your music “tells stories about friendship, coincidence and openness that go beyond geographical and cultural borders”. The word coincidence caught my eye; can you tell us a bit about some of the stories related to coincidence?

Utku: Well, it was a coincidence that I ended up coming to Austria. After having lived in Canada, it was a really random choice to come to Austria. I did not come here to play music and I had no relation to art, other than my own personal taste and stuff like that. Then having met Manuel, my entire life changed in Vienna, perhaps I wouldn’t have stayed here if I had not started playing music with him.

Manuel: Also the way the two of us met was a mere coincidence because I think it was at Vestibul at Impulstanz that our friend, he was playing with you, and that’s how we met. That’s also how our musical, or sonic odyssey started.

Utku: Because you start telling stories to one another, about your experiences—and of course they come from a geographical context or background—once you start telling those stories you realize commonalities, because we are all human after all, but finding those commonalities was strange, I didn’t expect it. You come to a new land and you expect to be a foreigner, but being welcomed in such a way, by Manuel, by my friends, it was a really sweet experience for me. I think it also manifested it’s way into music, because I have no theoretical musical background, so when Manuel expresses something, for me to interpret that, to be able to reflect it in my singing, requires much more than plain communication.

In your song “How Many Times” you ask “How many times in your life will you run away?” ..which is a pretty hard question to face. Is this about your own experiences? Has asking this question changed anything for you in your personal lives?

Manuel: Yes, I can speak for myself in my life. I would say it has changed something because, this song, we have been working on it for a couple of years, and we have been facing this question many many times. It’s also a very broad question. You can look at many different aspects of your life that you are running away from, you can apply the question over and over again. There are many aspects of my life where I ask if I am honest with myself and true with my emotions.

Utku: I think that question goes for every person because people’s lives are based on patterns and repetitions, etc. We tend to repeat stuff that we’re not too happy with. To overcome that was an experience we had to go through many times. That track really helped us to understand what that question is really about, because without really understanding the question, you cannot make the track and build it and shape it. If you talk about an idea, you have to know about it in order to properly explain it. I think it could be that, and I’m joking, but because Manuel got to observe me doing the wrong thing over and over again that helped us to go, “Ok, I know what we’re talking about now!”

You’ve said that the title „Room 167“ comes from the address of the shared flat in Vienna where the both of you lived and made music. You also said, “Room 167 does not only correspond to a space. Room 167 is a room-like space in time…” and “...perhaps there was no clear beginning or an end to Room 167” which is a very nice thought. Have you been able to recreate the feeling of that room, that space, elsewhere? Has that been hard to do living apart and in different cities?

Manuel: I think we managed to keep Room 167 alive after both of us moved out of that flat. It is because we both started to conceptualize what happened there as something that goes beyond the actual room, it really became something like a memory space where we can introduce artifacts and store them there. Not only that, also relationships with people who had been in the space, we hosted concerts there, people who shared with us this musical experience. In that sense we managed to keep it, I don’t want to say alive, but keep the feeling present.

Utku: If a place, a friendship, or an experience makes you real, like you, then I think it’s impossible you forget that, because it’s a feeling you would be longing for when you go far away. That is the reason why I went to Berlin for a year and a half, as an experience. Despite that we kept the connection. When I look back, in the summer we tried playing in different rooms, but I think the feeling and our way of playing music and how we approach things is exactly the same as how we left it in Room 167.

Do you have anything you’d like to add? Anything we should look out for that you’re working on now?

Manuel: We’re very proud of our latest video “How Many Times” that we produced together with Franz Quitt and Katharina Senk. We are very thankful to them for producing it together with us. We’re very much looking forward to our next shows. We’re going to play here and there in Vienna. We have our album coming up, Room 167, and we are planning on releasing it in a very special way.

Utku: We have accumulated two albums worth of tracks, around 20 I would say, and we plan to release it, but we are not a commercial band, so we don’t do anything commercially—we have ideas—instead of T-Shirts we try to make a book and stuff like that. We have a nice line-up coming up, you can keep an eye on us on social media, we are not that active, but still it gives a pretty good idea. You can DM us and we can add you to our Whatsapp group, the “Raven and Phan Chronicle”, no spam, no replies, just short messages about what we’re up to.

Improper Sessions is a concert series in which we’re inviting musicians to play in the middle of an existing exhibition, with the entire evening dedicated to the musical act. It’s a platform for musicians to present their music outside of the standard concept of the concert stage or music video; a space where we can create something together, allowing for more sides of the musician to be seen. Each performance takes place in front of a small audience and is live streamed. You can learn more about each musician/band via a short interview released in each Improper Dose following the concert, as well as an additional edited video that we believe will be quite beautiful, so make sure to check this out and be on the lookout for future acts!

IMPROPER SESSIONS presents RAVEN AND PHAN