Yasmine: Finding Sound Before Thought

Twenty-two people came on May 22. No ticket, no stage, no distance between the musicians and the room. Just three people and the music they had been building together since the spring of 2020.

Yasmine had come home.

How Yasmine Began

Yasmine was born in spring 2020 from the simplest possible impulse: three musicians who wanted to play together, with no brief and no concept beyond the bare practice of finding a sound.

Experimentation came before musical thought. That was the rule, if there was one. Barbara Zanoni, Igor Niego, and I began working with the oral traditions of the Mediterranean — ancient melodies woven onto the rhythms of tradition — but without the obligation to reproduce them faithfully. The approach was open from the start: ethnic instruments from the Mediterranean alongside Western ones, the voice treated with the same freedom as any other instrument.

What emerged from that first year of research was a project that had matured toward fluency — arrangements that breathe, that move between the immediate and the gradual, that let the sonic essence of traditional material surface intact and recognisable, like an old scent that awakens dormant memories and makes them vivid and present. Recognised even from a distance. Felt as one’s own.

The Lineup

• Barbara Zanoni — voice, bendir
• Igor Niego — kaval, gaida, clarinet, percussion
• Özgür Yalçın — santur, guitar, percussion, voice

Igor moves between the kaval — the end-blown flute of the Balkan and Anatolian pastoral tradition — the Bulgarian gaida, and clarinet. Each instrument carries a different geography with it, a different emotional register. Barbara’s voice is the anchor: direct, undecorated, rooted in the material without being bound by it. Her bendir playing gives the rhythmic foundation a second pulse alongside Igor’s percussion work.

The santur, guitar, and voice from my side complete the triangle. Three instruments, three voices, three musical backgrounds finding a common language through practice rather than theory.

What Yasmine Is About

The project’s deeper intention is a return to essentiality — to what we might call an archaic sound, Dionysian if you like, that in evoking another time or another place is nonetheless felt entirely in the present. Music that keeps you in the here and now while expanding the geographic and ethnic coordinates of that now.

Yasmine does not seek definitions. It does not need to define itself. It seeks only to recognise itself as deeply human — musical practice as a shared ritual of beauty, sound as something that belongs to everyone who listens.

That is a difficult thing to describe and a straightforward thing to experience. On May 22, twenty-two people experienced it.

A Project Still Finding Its Shape

At the time of this concert, Yasmine had been developing for just over a year. The arrangements were still fluid, the direction still emerging. That quality — of music in motion, not yet fixed — was part of what made the evenings compelling. You were not hearing a finished product. You were hearing a process.

That process would continue through further concerts and collaborations in the months and years ahead.

Tapadum hosts concerts from across the Mediterranean and beyond. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.