CFMA and Indie Award-Winners Minor Empire
Debut in the West
July 13-15 Vancouver Folk Music Festival, Vancouver, BC
July 19-20 Islands Folk Festival, Duncan, BC
July 21-22 Mission Folk Music Festival, Mission, BC
July 25 Festival Place, Sherwood Park, AB
July 27 Banff Centre, Banff, AB
July 28 Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, ON
July 29 Hillside Festival, Guelph, ON
Winners of two major music awards for the year’s best world album, Minor Empire is a captivating global music super group, born out of its founders’ love of lo-fi and their homesickness for the
music of their native Turkey.
Its sound is defined by the dreamy vocals of Ozgu Ozman, which soar above an ambient bed of organic instrumentation – kanun, saz, oud, and world percussion, clarinet, guitar and bass -- to create the airy, atmospheric vibe of an updated Buddha Bar collection.
Exclaim praised its debut album, Second Nature, for its “slinky, dub-y, Turkish soup of knotty
rhythms.” Le Devoir called the sound “refined” and said Ozman weaves a most beautiful
music from her Turkish roots. Songlines praised Ozman’s “pure and sinuous vocals” and “the
percussion that simmers with delicious intensity without ever quite reaching a boil.” CBC Radio
said the album marked “an important way forward for Turkish and world music, in general.”
The band is the brainchild of Ozan Boz and Ozgu Ozman, veterans of the Toronto trip-hop band
Auxetic Pulse, who immigrated to Canada from Turkey ten years ago, purely out of a sense of
adventure. Boz was largely a self-taught guitarist and Ozman a student of jazz vocals. Both
followed trends in British music far more closely than those at home.
That is, until they’d been in Canada for a while.
Each trip home saw them returning with more and more Turkish music. Meanwhile, fans quizzed
the duo on why they couldn’t hear a Turkish influence in their sound – and Boz and Ozman, now
nostalgic for their native land, started asking themselves the same thing.
A project that began as an Auxetic Pulse album slowly morphed into a whole new
venture featuring some of the finest Juno-nominated world and new music players in
Toronto: Autorickshaw percussionist Debashis Sinha, Tasa bassist Chris Gartner, and Sicilian
Jazz Project guitarist Michael Occhipinti. In addition, Boz sought out traditional musicians who
could help round out the sound: Toronto saz player Sidar Demirer, Montreal oud-player Ismail
Hakki Fencioglu and Montreal kanun player Didem Basar. He even planned a special trip to
Turkey to record renowned clarinet-player Selim Sesler.
Boz laboured over the recording for months, working to perfect the mixture of East and West,
organic and electronic, traditional and trippy. His perfectionism paid off in January of last year,
when the album was released to instant acclaim.
It won the 2011 Canadian Folk Music Award for World Group of the Year and the 2012 Indie
Award for Favourite World Artist of the Year. It also topped the Canadian national world music
chart and was nominated for an About.com World Music Readers Choice Award. The band
played the Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Markham Jazz Festivals, Luminato, Sunfest, and the
Arab World Fest in Montreal.
This tour, however, marks Minor Empire’s first trip to Western Canada. For Western Canadian
fans of world music, it’s a chance to catch a first glimpse of an act that is arguably the freshest
and most original to come out of Canada in quite some time.
Official Website: http://www.minorempire.net
