Ece Özel: „I don’t like to be in the center of attention“

Published December, 2024
by Easterndaze

It’s quite cold in Istanbul now, reports Ece Özel at the start of our Zoom call. It’s 12 degrees, but that’s just the beginning, the real winter is yet to come, including snow. Anyone who has ever spent a summer in Istanbul, as I did for a few weeks this year, can’t imagine the city being anything other than far too hot. But that’s how it often is, you think there’s only one face, but things, people and even cities possess many of them.

Even before I first arrived in Istanbul, I had already heard a lot about Ece Özel from friends and fellow DJs – and of course knew her digitally available sets, of which I particularly remember the euphoric and profound set from “Het Weekend” at De School (from 12.11.2023).

Ece Özel (Photo: Kıvılcım S. Güngörün)

Özel is one of those special DJs that we know in the Rhineland mainly from the Salon des Amateurs school, idiosyncratic in the best sense of the word, i.e. headstrong, non-conformist, not interested in the expected flow. In her artist bio, she herself speaks of “idiosyncratic, mutant, and rigorous transitions.” Which is not to say that she is not interested in the listeners and dancers; on the contrary, in the Istanbul-born artist’s always carefully chosen words, a high sensitivity for shared sociality can be felt, but not one at any price, but on the basis of genuine interest and the resulting willingness to exchange ideas.
Generally speaking, and with her even more so, a set must first be felt by the DJ before it can fill a room. But more on that later, when Ece Özel takes us to Gizli Bahçe.

According to her reputation, the person behind the sets is reserved, even reserved. And since Özel means private in Turkish, the question arises as to whether this is an artist’s name. This is not the case, notes Ece Özel – and adds that Özel can also be translated as “special”. Smiling (and believably), she adds that she has never thought about this connection between her name and her person. A smile that can certainly be read as meaning that she likes the connection.

Ece Özel (Photo: Kıvılcım S. Güngörün)

“If it wasn’t photographed, it didn’t happen”

From the private Ece Özel in 2024, it is only a small leap to the public persona, as the DJ business, to call it what it is in 99% of cultivated (or rather uncultivated) cases by now, has developed into a persona business. The years of darkened rooms with strobe lights and fog, where you often didn’t know who was DJing, are so long gone that the younger generations of DJs only know them from myths and stories. The no-photos policy in many clubs doesn’t help either; the warm-up and after-hours of club culture currently take place strictly on the Instagram floor. As a friend of mine from Los Angeles always so aptly observes: “If it wasn’t photographed, it didn’t happen.”

How does this business model feel for such a private artist? Ece takes a step back for her answer: „This is not a trend. This is how it is now. When I first realised things were changing, I was very annoyed because I’m not like that at all. I don’t really use my social media that much. Or let’s say it this way: I don’t really know what I’m doing with social media, I don’t have any strategies or anything. I just post if something feels relevant. I don’t like to be in the centre of attention. But then again: I choose a job for which I’m on a stage. So maybe I like to be in the centre of attention after all. I don’t know.“

This “I don’t know” is typical of Ece Özel. She uses it very often in our hour-long conversation. You could read it as a phrase in the American sense, but it’s much more than that, it’s a credible classification of her own statements as being no more significant or insightful than those of the other person – and I don’t just mean me at that moment.
Ece is characterised by a likeable calmness, she gives her ego and herself much less space than is otherwise common among her professional colleagues in 2024. But the insta-game is not just a problem for DJs, she notes, it also affects visual artists. “Most artists feel that they have to post their process of paintings, for example.”

Ece Özel (Photo: Kıvılcım S. Güngörün)

„Painting is my life when I’m not in the club“

It is no coincidence that Ece Özel brings art into play. It was her first love. “I started drawing the first moment I could hold a pencil,” she says. ”I was four or five years old back then. There was nothing else I wanted to do.”
Studying art was therefore the next logical step. Even if it didn’t turn out the way she had imagined. Like many art students before her, she quickly realised that the academy didn’t really strengthen her love of art: the very conservative Turkish art scene at the time did the rest – with the result that the unthinkable happened and she actually turned her back on painting for a decade.

Today, however, it sounds different again: “Painting is my life when I’m not in the club,” comments Ece Özel – and you can see her joy at these words. It wasn’t so long ago that she was able to communicate the “transition” she is currently going through so clearly. For a while, for example, she maintained two parallel Instagram identities for painting and DJing, she explains, so as not to confuse people, but this became too much for her (which is not surprising after what she has said so far) and so she merged her arts, so to speak. “I mean, if people are confused, people are confused,” she comments dryly.

For a few minutes, we drift off in conversation, philosophising about the beauty of confusion for artistic practice, indeed for life itself. It’s not for nothing that the most formative of all Cologne parties was called “Total Confusion”. Only those who are able to surrender to confusion can really let go. But the promise of an unforgettable club night is usually only fulfilled if you don’t know beforehand where the entrance to the rabbit hole is and certainly not how to get out again.
Listening to Ece Özel, a Zen-Buddhist feeling quickly sets in, although she is obviously not happy with many aspects of current club culture, the art world and world politics, she usually manages not to show the frustration, or even more so, not to allow the negative turmoil that consumes us all, but to convey an almost transcendent attitude.

Ece Özel (Photo: Kıvılcım S. Güngörün)

Work in nightlife

Two people in her life were responsible for her turning from art to music in the first place. First and foremost her father, a jazz head, as she puts it, who ran bars in Bodrum and then Patara in southern Turkey for many years. He constantly brought music home on tapes, not just jazz, but all kinds of genres. For example, she discovered “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” by Brian Eno and David Bryne through him, as well as various Pink Floyd albums.

After studying art, however, Ece started working in the fashion industry – repelled by the institutionalised art world – before a friend asked her one day if she would like to DJ in his bar, as she knew so much good music. She didn’t think twice and said yes, what could go wrong, especially in a bar. She had no idea at the time that it would lead to more bookings (and ultimately to another career change), but she liked the surprise. The freedom that she no longer felt in art was still palpable in DJing. And so her early sets were still completely open in terms of style, a kind of stringing together of pieces that she liked – and ultimately it’s still a bit like that, even if the sets have of course quickly developed into what is probably called dance music.

Since we have already introduced the father, the mother should not go unmentioned, especially since she was the one who was, let’s call it, skeptical about the change from art to music. “With painting, they couldn’t avoid it, it was simply there; “My teachers in elementary school said to my parents that they have to send me to art school – or I’m going to fuck up,” remembers Ece Özel with a smile. “But my mom cried when she heard I was DJing. Maybe because she never liked the idea that my father had a bar. and had to work in nightlife. So: This was 16 years ago – nobody really wanted to be a Dj, it wasn’t even a real job – I don’t think this amount of money was involved just 10 years ago. So she was completely confused. Now techno became very big, a real industry. Now she’s very proud.”

The pandemic definitely left its mark on Ece Özel. On the one hand, there was a paradigm shift towards the fast-paced spectacle sound of the 2022, 2023 and 2024 seasons (and probably 2025 too), which is not her thing, and on the other hand, traveling has definitely become more difficult recently. And so Özel is now trying to DJ less outside of Turkey, if it were up to her, once a month would be enough – “more than once a month, it’s getting on my nerves now” – even though she knows, of course, that this is hardly economically sustainable, even if she DJs a lot in Istanbul. Her hope is to close the income gap with purchased images. Just the day before our interview, she sold a painting, she says happily.

Judging from the pictures I have seen on her Instagram page, I would venture to say that her art is less idiosyncratically tangled than her DJ sets. Ece Özel’s pictures are characterised by clear surfaces and lots of open spaces. I half expect her critical reaction. But instead she is visibly pleased with my categorisation. „With my music i have the reputation that it can go many ways. Some promoters are very happy that they don’t know what I’m going to deliver, they are very excited of the result – but also some promoters or some clubs, they don’t know what I’m going to deliver, and they’re worried if it’s going to work, you know. So it goes in both ways. But I’m happy to hear that I’m more clear with the painting.“

Ece Özel (Photo: Kıvılcım S. Güngörün)

Die Freuden der Özel / Special Interest

As already mentioned, Ece Özel has been playing more in her home city of Istanbul again since the pandemic, much to the delight of her fanbase, which she has been cultivating for almost fifteen years. In 2010, she started her now party series “Özel Zevkler” (which could be loosely translated as “The Joys of Özel”, but she prefers “Special Interest”), initially at MiniMuzikhol until 2016, then from 2017 to 2021 at Arkaoda, where she still plays today. The concept of “Özel Zevkler” was to have experimental band performances and live sets before the DJ sets, just like the “Trash” parties by Erol Alkan in London, for example, or the parties by DFA Records in New York and Conny Opper in Berlin. At some point, however, the organizational logistics besides DJing became too stressful for her.

Ece currently has residencies at Gizli Bahce and Arkaoda. I ask her how she feels about Istanbul’s nightlife in view of the many tourists in the city. “Actually I don’t really feel the tourists,” she replies surprisingly. “Of course I see some foreigners in the club, but first they’re not the majority and secondly if you find small places like Arkoda and Gizli Bahce, or Frankhan you are searching for a different world.” In addition, you shouldn’t forget that the tourists bring in the money. “That’s what’s helped Berlin’s music scene. That’s why you have a lot of experimental stuff there because you have so many people come by for that.”

Ece Özel (Photo: Burcu Karademir)

In the hidden garden with Ece Özel

It’s a good time to go out with Ece Özel. First, we meet up at Asmalı Cavit, a long-established artists’ restaurant in a side street off the main shopping street İstiklal, where you can get the most delicious meze in town. My favourites: the white tuna, the eggplant salad and the marinated octopus. While the others have two bottles of rakı in the best Turkish tradition as a pre-dinner drink in a wonderful ritual of dilution, I stick to the very good red house wine. Afterwards, we head to the tavern for a drink before heading up the Capanoglu Sk. Steps up to Gizli Bahçe. Although the city centre now seems like a tourist bubble, there are still many of the “old” places of sub-cultural gathering. However, as Ece Özel points out, gentrification has not only harmed the area we are in that night; ten years ago, for example, Capanoglu Sk. could not have been entered at night. And yes, the corner is still characterised by something of that New York, Alphabet City charm of the 80s.

When she arrives at Gizli Bahçe, Ece Özel has to get started straight away. The two-storey club radiates an inviting coziness with its hippie ambience. While the music on the lower floor is primarily a soundtrack for smoking. Drinking and chatting during the breaks, a club feeling immediately sets in upstairs. People have come to dance – and Ece skilfully takes them along on her four-hour sound journey, seducing them psychedelically, flirting house-like and also being strictly ‘technoid’ at the right moment; her set ends too early, but very appropriately – and inspired by our dinner conversation – with a hip-hop track by Actual: “Rick will Ross you”.

Gizli Bahçe
Hüseyinağa, Nevizade Sk. No:15, 34435 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkei

Asmalı Cavit
Asmalimescit Caddesi No: 16/D, Istanbul 34430 Türkei

Tavern
Firuzağa, A, Hayriye Cd. No:16/A, 34425 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkei

„After that it went shit show“

Since 2018 Ece Özel is running the Müstesna Records label together with Umut Kahya (the former booker of Arkaoda Istanbul; he currently organizes the party series Zattirizat – with the associated website https://zattirizat.com ). Unfortunately, the economic conditions did not really play along. After the first vinyl compilation “Etnik Sentetik – Selected Works 1995-2006” and the vinyl album “Alper Maral + Mert Topel – Control Voltage Project”, they had to switch to digital releases due to the high costs (inflation, which has been hitting Turkey brutally for several years, and later on top of that the consequences of the pandemic), a format that doesn’t really give them enough to continue their work. But the idea hasn’t been completely shelved yet, she notes, a record and a vinyl compilation a year would be great.
Especially as it’s only a small leap from her own label to her own releases. Or not, as the case may be. Because apart from a guest appearance on a piece by Elena Colombi, Ece Özel has not yet released anything.

On “Pine Seedlings”, Ece Özel reads a poem by the progressive Turkish poet Lale Müldür, which is somehow about relationships but doesn’t really make sense, and that’s exactly what’s great about Müldür, Özel comments.
It’s not that DJs always have to be producers, just think of a DJ like Ben UFO, who runs Hessle Audio together with Pearson Sound and Pangaea. But in the end, most people are itching to do it – so Ece, really no ambitions in this direction? “I have maybe 15 tracks form which I’m sure that there’s a track in those sketches,” she reveals cautiously. She simply doesn’t have the time to properly familiarise herself with Ableton in order to finalise the tracks. But it’s not impossible that something will come of it…

I ask Ece whether she actually perceives techno as a continuation of what she learnt from punk, implying that the community in which she moves in electronic music still has something of a socio-political substructure and superstructure.
“I don’t know” she begins cautiously again. “I’m not sure because there are so many other things that I listened to in between. But it is definitely still helping my algorithm to play in my sets also the punk music that I was really into 20 years ago. Yes, that attitude, I still keep that in mind even when I’m playing completely something else.”
However, it wasn’t the case that the punk of her youth had much to do with (cultural) political orientation or disorientation, she says, taking a critical view not of the present, but of the past. Back then, punk was,for her, above all a zeitgeist phenomenon, so she has to be honest. “Punk in Istanbul, wasn’t that political. I mean, to be honest: we were teenagers, I only found out about the political side of it much later. It was like going to a club or punk concert to lose yourself. The political side, I wasn’t really thinking about it when I was younger.”

I want to know how she experienced the political protests that shaped Istanbul from May 2013 onwards and are still visible today in the form of massive inner-city restructuring and a constant police presence. It was a time of isolation she explains, as most international musicians simply avoided the country for fear of problems entering and leaving the country. Regular club operations were impossible. Which is not to say that they didn’t party, but they did so privately. She assesses the consequences soberly: “After that it went shit show. Especially the Taksim area, because most of the cultural things happen here. Most of the clubs are here. Most of the concerts are here. And also there were a few terrorist attacks, bombs. So it went completely shit show after 2016. And then the pandemic happened.”

The picture that Ece Özel paints is not really optimistic. Although people do publicly express criticism, thanks to social media, the result is repeated arrests, even for simple tweets. She interrupts her words, hesitates and then adds. “I think the problem is nothing is changing right now. Or we just don’t see the change yet. I don’t know.”

You certainly have to be careful with comparisons, but let’s put it this way: the impacts are getting closer in Western democracies too. Of course, not (yet) to the same extent as in Turkey, or Georgia, a country with which Ece has close links via the burgeoning electronic music scene in Tbilisi.
And Israel, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon are also much closer to Turkey than to Germany, for example. And yet Ece Özel replies “not at all” to my question as to whether these conflicts can be felt in her everyday life. Isn’t that crazy, I ask? “Yeah, crazy, right?”, she agrees, and then goes on to give a more concrete answer: ”They are present in my life because I follow the news as I want to know what’s happening. But other than that, it’s not affecting my life in a single way. There’s so many people that are not aware of what’s going on. And it’s very close.”

Ece Özel (Photo: Kıvılcım S. Güngörün)

And what’s next, Ece Özel?

„I’m just preparing the application for an exhibition format for new artists in Istanbul. They show the works of like 25 to 30 artists.“

What is your favorite ferry in Istanbul?

„My favorite ferry is Karaköy-Kadıköy. That’s the one I take it all the time.“

And your favorite area in Istanbul?

„I like the area I live in a lot, but also I’m tired of this neighbourhood. So: My favourite area is on the other side. It’s called Bağdat Caddesi. Bağdat Avenue is where I was born. It’s a very long, big avenue close to the sea.“

Ece, would you describe yourself as an optimistic person?

„Yes, mostly.“

Finally, I would like to know which three pieces from 2024 are your favorites of the year so far?

Text by Thomas Venker, originally published by Kaput Magazine.
Lead photo Ece Özel (Photo: Kıvılcım S. Güngörün)

This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.