In Memoriam: Mimaroğlu at 100

This year marks one hundred years since the birth of İlhan Mimaroğlu, the Istanbul-born, New York-forged composer, producer, and thinker whose restless imagination left an indelible mark on the landscapes of electronic music, jazz, and avant-garde sound.

To honor this milestone, we gather not for a retrospective in the conventional sense, but for something more intimate: a space for those who knew İlhan, worked alongside him, were shaped by him, or simply found themselves at some point in the orbit of his world.

The evening promises encounters with surprise guests, and a rare look into corners of Mimaroğlu's life and work that have never before been made public: documents, recordings, and moments that reframe who he was and what he left behind.

Among the night's highlights, Istanbul-based producer and DJ Grup Ses will present a very special set drawn from a remarkable discovery made during the production of the Mimaroğlu documentary: the joint cassette archive of İlhan and Güngör Mimaroğlu. Digitized by Grup Ses, the collection brings together recordings from Mimaroğlu's own radio programs alongside carefully selected excerpts from the couple's personal cassette collection, tapes gifted, gathered, and treasured over a lifetime. The resulting set moves from Linda Sharrock to Meral Güneyman, and marks Grup Ses's first appearance at Istanbul Experimental in seven years.

A centennial is many things at once: a number, a threshold, an invitation to listen again.