Sound artist Mercan Dede builds music on heartbeats and ancient wisdom.
Arkin Allen is a glass-half-full kind of guy. As dark as recent days have been in his homeland of Turkey, the artist known by some as Mercan Dede looks towards the light.
''The whole world is facing very difficult times: earthquakes, wars, economic meltdown. It's these days that make you understand how music, art and culture [are] so important,'' he says.
''Since the earthquake there are all the time concerts for fund-raising. If you have a concert tomorrow, 15,000 people will go there. Music art is showing us the way we have to go on.''
Mercan Dede is one of nine names under which Allen makes his music, which sits at a crossroads between the ancient traditions, reed flutes and hand drums of the East and the turntables and high-tech modernity of the West.
Not even his family or management know all of his identities, he claims, because ''nothing should stand between sound and the ear, including the artist himself''.
It might sound like a glib soundbite to an ear accustomed to the gimmicks of the prefab pop world, but the ebbing and swirling sound of Mercan Dede has a weird way of disarming the mind and making the body heavy in surrender.
''In Turkish we call this 'music of heart','' says the 45-year-old composer, DJ and player of several hypnotic Middle Eastern instruments.
''It's not too intellectual and we would like to keep it that way because sometimes we give too much importance to mind.''
Yeah, yeah, but what's the trance code? Surely there's some mathematical tempo plus frequency formula that makes his spiralling drones and slow twanging gut-strings get under your ribs like that?
''There are certain things,'' he concedes. ''One of them is mathematical, in a way. In all my albums there is a heartbeat. I don't mean synthetic digital heartbeats. I mean the heart, literally.
''And in every album, we have the sound of nature. Same thing, we will go out and record that sound. Rain, wind, fire.
''These things are part of us. The heartbeat is the first percussion. It doesn't matter who we are. Before we are born, we know it.''
Allen was immersed in Sufi philosophy and music as a child in Bursa, north-west Turkey. He moved to Istanbul to study journalism in his teens, then to Canada as an exhibiting photographer and student of multimedia.
There, working in a bar in the late 1980s, he realised a profound parallel between the ascending culture of electronic music and the traditions of his ancestry. This counterpoint would inform seven highly regarded albums as Mercan Dede.
''The Turks come from central Asia, from shamanic tradition and [there is] also the whole influence of Islam, so there is this incredible tradition of healing with the music,'' he explains.
''In Sufism we have different meditations and there is one person who is like the head of the symphony, the maestro of the ceremony. I became fascinated with the similar way the DJ can move the energy of the crowd: he can drop it, he can change it.
''Then I became also fascinated by the idea of mixing songs together in electronic music. That, for me, is what Sufism is about: a meeting point, like Istanbul; something between East and West, something very ancient and something very modern.''
Mercan Dede sold out the Forum on his last visit here in 2008, following a number one album on the UK world music charts: 800 was an 800th birthday dedication to the Sufi mystic, Rumi.
His new Istanbul Quartet promises a more traditional experience this time, complete with whirling dervish to aid communion with the universe. And yes, there's a kind of maths involved there, too.
''The dervish dances in one single point, then he starts to turn, and the turning is in harmony with the whole universe,'' Allen explains. ''The little electrons in our atoms keep spinning, and the universe keeps spinning. So we have a journey all together with the universe.''
Mercan Dede performs at the Playhouse at 7.30pm on Sunday, the closing night of the Australasian World Music Expo.
theartscentre.com.au
awme.com.au
Picture: Sound artist Mercan Dede builds music on heartbeats and ancient rhythms. Photo: Masiar Pasquali.
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