THE POET OF SOUND AND IMAGE
KiNo CREATES MULTI-DIMENSIONAL ART, MUSIC AND CINEMA FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A POET. CONCERNED WITH HISTORY, LANGUAGE AND REALITY HIS INTELLECTUAL OUTPUT IS DRIVEN BY REVISION AND REINFORCEMENT OF THE FUNDAMENTALS.
MUSIC
KiNo started composing songs only on the black keys of an organ at the age of 6 at his grandparent’s home. In his teens, he borrowed a guitar from a girl named Carmen. After graduating from the University of Middlesex in Film Studies and Art History, he left London and arrived in New York with a suitcase and a guitar. The customs officer cracked a joke, “Which Beatle are you, then?”.
He laid his roots down at Nublu, an influential downtown music club owned by saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin. There he blossomed into a prolific songwriter while expanding his musical influences under the camaraderie of Ersahin, and other heavyweight musicians; Juini Booth, Butch Morris, Kenny Wollesen… At Nublu, KiNo formed a band to play his music live and started recording an EP with the bassist Michael Kiaer. Through Ersahin’s recommendation, he went to see the music mogul Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records. Ertegun, graciously, grandfatherly, took the long meeting to explain the young man how the music industry really worked; shareholders vs. artist development.
There he blossomed into a prolific songwriter while expanding his musical influences under the camaraderie of Ersahin and other heavyweight musicians; Juini Booth, Butch Morris, Kenny Wollesen…
One fateful day, Ersahin introduced KiNo to the most important figure in his artistic development who would become his mentor-producer: Jeff Blenkinsopp. Blenkinsopp invents analogue processing machines, admired by David Bowie as a sonic wizard. He had been a long term Pink Floyd collaborator, and has worked with a trove of other influential artists; Hawkwind, Vangelis, The Sweet, Kate Bush, The Clash and The Secret Machines.
The evolution of KiNo from a promising songwriter into a self-contained artist and producer happened at Blenkinsopp’s studio on W28th Street over the course of many years. Blenkinsopp pushed KiNo to define himself as the Poet of Sound and Image. Ears NYC was Blenkinsopp’s legendary repair shop for synths which financed the writing, development and recording of KiNo’s debut album Map of the Universe, albeit, never completed.
Through Blenkinsopp’s efforts, KiNo emerged as a multi-instrumentalist. Because of this, live performances was a great challenge. Blenkinsopp built an all analogue, one-of-a-kind live processing device: the Tower of Power that carried the studio sonics to the stage. The machines were expensive to run and many iterations of the backing band failed due to complexity of the music and lack of funds.
Under Blenkinsopp’s extravagant live production, legendary musicians such as the electronic music pioneer and producer Malcolm Cecil (Tonto, Stevie Wonder, Gil Scott Heron), as well as Andy Rourke (The Smiths) have joined KiNo. Consisting of a vast array of influences from progressive rock to disco, punk to classical music, KiNo’s songs feature adventurous forms while maintaining a highly melodic aesthetic.
FILM
KiNo’s technical comprehension of the audio/visual medium started as a kid on his father’s electronic devices. He preferred his handy-cam, VCR recorder, tape decks, microphones, and Commodore 64 to any of his toys. He loved experimenting with cassettes and video tapes; constantly recording, overdubbing, creating live video feedbacks. Family functions was filmed and photographed by him. Before he could start going to the cinema, his first wave of fascination came from Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, and Cinecitta flicks he found on betamax tapes at home. Mostly, Sword and Sandal flicks. Later, like everyone else, he got sucked into the Hollywood exports StarWars, Rocky, Jaws, Indiana Jones through television.. But, his true fascination was with the old black and white films.
By the saving grace of the curiosity of adolescence, KiNo went headlong into the seductive world of black and white films; the silent era, film noirs, European cinema quickly absorbed him. With each decade came the style, the characters and the soundtrack of a world that began to emerge as the representation of modernism in his head.
Cinema was such a fertile discovery plain for KiNo that yielded endless references; opening the doors of perception, introducing him to the greats of every artistic canon. One, above all, would be central to KiNo’s intellectual matrix: Jean-Luc Godard. The road to the film studies was paved, complimenting KiNo’s musical and poetic vessel for the formation of his image-sound-word axis. His meta-language that conveys the poetic ‘text’ in 3 forms of expression. Music, film and the philosophy of the Revolutionary Poet.
KiNo’s first entry to the film festival circuit was with a special showcase of his film-song Cast a Pall of Win (2013) at the International Lucerne Film Festival in Switzerland.
The winner of Best Cinematography award at the International Thessaloniki Short Film Festival, Film Istanbul (2014) features Jane Birkin and Ilhan Ersahin in a poetic vignette of Istanbul’s modern and ancient spirit.
Poet of Sound and Image (2015) is KiNo’s first feature length, devised as a live musical presentation. Booming across 7 years of documentation, KiNo’s musical world bursts upon and outside the screen with a personal cinematic language. The film is partially a documentary and a retroactive testimony of a young poet who has, at each step of his development, consistently clashed with the symptoms of a confused civilisation; transitioning from the 20th to 21st century, from analogue to digital, local to global.
KiNo’s collaboration with the seminal DJ Richie Hawtin a.k.a. Plastikman resulted in a silent film about the anatomy of rave; Crowd Control to Lose Control (2015) shot in Tbilisi, Georgia.
After 2011, KiNo spent a decade developing his long term projects, set in three different countries; Italy, Turkiye, and United States. These projects are all revolutionary in the sense that KiNo is modulating rigid formats of artistic mediums to a truly personal mode, forming his very own system, driven by fundamental innovations he is making to the way we perceive, a film, a book, an album, etc.
To that end, CORPUS ENIGMA, set in Roma and Los Angeles is a film-myth, i.e. KiNo himself as a film that runs on an active script. From its inception, every sequence is a chapter of his life unfolding in reality according to an impossible mission; the destruction of the Image based reality with a single handheld camera. In Corpus Enigma, KiNo is a musician plagued by the internet; he doesn’t want to release his music to its oblivious stream. Therefore, he creates a reality show, NEW VAGUE CITY, to create the world of his music, which turns into a creative platform, the production field of Corpus Enigma.
Since 2018, KiNo operates out of Ricordata, his radical studio founded in NYC, which moved to Hollywood, Los Angeles during the pandemic in 2020.
Currently, the new season of New Vague City, Invasion from Within, is producing the film-situation The End of Hollywood, in which KiNo’s collaboration with the Hollywood aristocrat John Barrymore becomes a standalone tv show called THE BARRYMORE FORTUNE.
KiNo’s biggest ambition is to launch a foundation, The Revolution of the Mind, that educates underprivileged children and youth with the works of art.
