I meet up with Nesrin Sen at Mariatorget subway station in Stockholm, Sweden, to do this interview, and we scurry along the streets in the cold of a February evening, past the lights in storefront windows at closing time, slipping and sliding over the sidewalk ice, trying to find a suitable coffee shop. Finally Nesrin spots a small café below street level, and we walk down a short flight of stairs and enter the warmth of inside, which dims my glasses.
It proved to be a perfect place. It was just luck, because neither of us had ever been there before. In the back there was a room obviously prepared for families with small kids, but it was empty and secluded, and we had it all to ourselves for most of the time.

We got out of our winter jackets and slid down at a table where I set up the microphone and headed into the conversation.

Before our rendezvous I had listened attentively to Nesrin Sen’s second and latest CD, just out from the printer’s, as I rode the train from my town up to Stockholm; an hour’s ride. She had sent it to me some weeks before, after she’d found the Sonoloco site on a CD with useful ventures for musicians.

I seldom write about music outside of the art music scene, but that is not because I’m personally stuck with art music, but because Sonoloco Record Reviews has come to be regarded as a primarily New Music site, for experimental and avant-garde music, which is why I get so much music of that kind in the mail to Sonoloco. My interests are much wider than that, though, so Nesrin Sen easily fits right in, as did Quiet Hollow a few years back – but I believe Quiet Hollow and Nesrin Sen are the only such entries from a scene outside of the contemporary or semi-contemporary art music scene that I have been fortunate to write about, except for some downright folk music records by Sofia Karlsson and Eva Tjörnebo.

Nesrin Sen’s two CDs are reviewed elsewhere at Sonoloco.

We head right into some bio notes. Nesrin was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden, though her name indicates a more varied inheritance (It doesn’t sound Swedish at all). Nesrin tells me that her parents came to Sweden from Turkey, and yes, Nesrin’s name sounds down home Turkish! Her parents lived in Izmir. Nesrin explains that her mother is partly Albanian too.

Does that inheritance mean anything for what you’re doing art wise, culturally – either in a concrete manner or like some kind of background radiation?

I understand you have learned Turkish?

That’s a little unusual, for people born here in Sweden to learn the language of their parents, I mean, really learn it well. You have learned it so well that you can work as an interpreter.

I asked you once – in an email – if you had heard Selda, who is a quite well known Turkish singer of the old school, but you didn’t, so you haven’t been particularly influenced by traditional or popular Turkish music, I take it?.

Taking pictures of Nesrin I remark that she looks kind, which also causes me to ask how come she has two songs on her new CD about killing people off. She laughs and blurts out:

I think, though, that you’re the first person I’ve met who can sing “you son of a bitch, I hope that you die”, and make it sound sensual!

Seems to me you’re in some kind of singer-songwriter tradition. I’ve been thinking about the American influences, new and old, like Essra Mohawk, who doesn’t sound like you but has an atmosphere in common with you; an aura, even without the words. I remember a singer called Melanie in the 60s, for example, whom you also remind me of, slightly.

I was impressed when I understood that you run your own production company; Nesrin Productions. How did you get to that point? How did you go about it?

But what about distribution? How do you manage that?

Let’s talk about education. What have you done?

Are there any gigs up ahead?

But you’re marketing yourself right now!