W: Pete James May I: Hugo Horsin

Mathis Akengin makes piano-driven pop where silence matters as much as the notes. At times, you can almost hear the flies buzzing… and the next moment everything shifts, like an elephant landing squarely in your chest.
  
Somewhere between the lyricism of Agnès Obel and the off-kilter dandy spirit of Baxter Dury. Mathis sings Franco-Turkish, moving between two languages, with the sense that people can understand each other without saying everything.
 
His debut album, ‘Passage des Fleurs’, is a letter to his Turkish grandfather. A love story without instructions, where words sometimes fall short but the connection remains. The title comes from the “Çiçek Pasajı”, a passageway in Istanbul where he spent part of his youth, a place of transition where the fragile meets the powerful, the fly meets the elephant.