London-based alt-electronic artist BODUR has shared her highly-anticipated debut album, MAQAM, and takes Wonderland through it, track-by-track.
BODUR’s debut album MAQAM was fine-tuned over the past two years and is filled with introspective lyricism, personal anecdotes and incredible musical moods. Across the project, she explores themes of racism, Islamophobia, and how that makes young people feel ugly and worthless.
Sonically, BODUR manoeuvres from Alternative-Electronic to Avant-Pop and elements of Rock & Jazz in a body of work that symbolises the arrival point for her career. Wonderland asked the artist herself to offer up a track-by-track analysis.
Listen to MAQAM…
Read BODUR’s track-by-track analysis.
“DOGTOOTH [INTRO]“
‘Dogtooth’ was a poem I wrote about feeling less-than-human and like the western world values the lives of dogs more than human people that look like me and my family. This was inspired by the ongoing dehumanisation of the Palestinian people. The poems opening verse is:
if I sharpened my teeth
into dogtooth
chewed through raw meat
chased my own tail
ran through the fields on all fours
until my corpse laid still
would you weep for me then?
This opening track is named after that poem as you can hear fragments of my voice performing the poem throughout the track, as a radio static voice trying to break through and deliver a message. I wanted to tease all of the instruments and electronic textures to come on the rest of the album and build anticipation for what’s next with this opener – which I think we did successfully. The full poem is written in the inner sleeve of the album vinyl and as subtitles on the visualiser for this track. It not being heard in full on the song itself – speaks to how voices with important political messages are often silenced.
“UGLY [NAHAWAND]“
Ugly is in maqam nahawand. Its mood is perfect for sad, lyrical, dramatic songs that explore emotional extremes. It can also be uplifting if played fast so I decided to make an extremely dramatic and sad song but uptempo and inspired by club sonics. A heartbreakingly sad club track. Ugly is about how the world I live in has made me feel ugly and worthless so many times. The first full lyric you hear me perform on the whole album is on this song; “If I was brave enough to end it all years ago” – declaring my frequent suicidal ideation. I thought that was the most honest yet insanely vulnerable place to contextualise a debut album. This track explores the thought that perhaps I am only an artist to receive praise and validation because I seek it and need it so much. “Don’t look at me” is how I really feel, “But please, please look at me” is what I seek when I’m on stage, being an artist, seeking attention and validation.
“ALONE AT LAST [KURD]“
When I wrote this song, I had written ‘ugly’ a few days before and I knew I wanted that to be the first song on the project. So I said if ‘ugly’ is an ‘ugly song’, lets try and make the most beautiful song we can possibly make to follow it. I picked Kurd as the maqam for the job, with its themes of freedom and romance.
I was moving in with my boyfriend of five years later that week, where we’d finally be ‘alone at last’ and have our freedom. However we were moving into his Dads old house, his childhood home and the place he’d watched his father slowly deteriorate until his death from pancreatic cancer last year – as his sole carer. I wrote this song about all of the emotions that we both felt about moving into this house together. The lyric about the bar of soap, I wrote after we’d moved into the house. I was washing my hands and he told me to “take it easy” on the bar of soap I was using, because his Dads hands had touched that soap and he didn’t want it to run out. That moment represents so many we’ve had since moving here, where his attachment to the space and what it represents for him is so deep and that despite us having our freedom in many ways now, we will both never be free from the grief and pain we feel from his Dad’s passing.
“TAPESTRY [HIJAZ]“
Tapestry is in maqam Hijaz, which evokes feelings of a distant desert, solitude, enchantment and mysticism.
Taking inspiration from Maqam Hijaz’s traditional themes, I wanted to make a song that sounded like a desert transitioning from sunset to midnight to the spooky hours of the morning (4am) in the black of night. So the instrumental gets more warped and crazy as it unfolds – as I imagine a person’s mind would unravel if they were trekking through the desert alone for long enough, they’d start hallucinating, talking to god etc. The percussion you can hear throughout the track is a Daf/frame drum. It’s a drum commonly used in the Middle East and almost always performed by large groups of women. The song’s lyrics explore generational trauma and how those in our family, that we love, make it hard for us to love them sometimes. As hard as walking through a desert. Yet we are all pieces of thread sewn into the tapestries of our ancestors, for better or for worse.
“OFF BALANCE [NAHAWAND II]“
Off Balance is about feeling out of sync with your partner and like the relationship is at a point where it’s so off balance, it can’t be saved. The main lyrical metaphor is circus plate-spinning. I’ve tried it a few times (lol) and once the plate tips off balance, no matter how hard you try to spin it back to the place it was – it’s inevitably going to fall off. It’s about that exact feeling in a relationship, where you know the end is inevitable, no matter how hard you’re trying to save it.
“TONY MADONNA [DADA]“
On so many great albums there’s often an obvious ‘single’ that is usually the worst song on the project. This song is usually void of emotion or any real story and stands out like a sore thumb against the rest of a great project, that’s generally made up of songs that DO have depth and creativity – but therefore aren’t as commercial. Tony Madonna is my critique of that whole notion. I intentionally wrote a song that is stupid, means nothing and makes no sense, inspired by the art movement dadaism. The vibe was ‘you want a single? I’ll give ya a bloody single! Here, have this crap!’ and low and behold everyone chose Tony Madonna as the single lol. This song is a satirical act of dada, as absurd and nonsensical in its nature as our current world politics.
“VIADUCT [JAIYA]“
Jaiya is my boyfriend’s name, this is a song about my love for him. When we originally recorded this song it didn’t feel right to me and I didn’t particularly like what I did with it. Then we accidentally bounced it out at the wrong tempo and I loved how it sounded slightly sped up. It made my voice sound like a warped, siren-mermaid. It had a new haunting and sensual energy to it that made for the perfect album track. I believe everything is a sign, and that accident was meant to happen.
“MORNING [9/8]“
Morning is in a traditional 9/8 time signature, following a rhythm commonly used in Turkish and Turkish Romani culture. It’s a lustful, sexy song about wanting someone playing a string instrument to study ME and play ME like said string instrument instead. The lyrics about strings are meant to highlight the presence of the oud and the guitar on this track. It’s funny because it’s actually me playing the oud on most of this tune. In the visuals for this track, which subsequently became the album-artwork, I’m transformed into a naked, living string-instrument. A personified oud!
“THANK YOU, FOR MAKING ME EXHALE [BAYAT]”
For this song I asked my parents Inez and Gus to go into separate rooms and to record themselves via the voice memo feature on their phones – talking without thinking, stream of consciousness style, about how they feel about one another. As I said, we lost my father in law to cancer last year and it changed all of our lives. We don’t take life for granted as much anymore. I told them both to say, via the recordings, to one another what they want each other to know before it’s too late. I told them to say what they’d say if it was the last thing they’d ever say to one another.
What resulted from these recordings was a beautiful, vulnerable outpouring of love, connection and admiration that has stood strong for over 26 years. I typed out a manuscript of these two recordings and noticed accidental rhymes and themes amongst both of their speeches. So I arranged them into a spoken word piece that keeps the entirety of their word choices and individual colloquialisms, but reads as a more rhythmic/poetic structure than just random talking. I recorded my rhythmic arrangement of their words over the incredible Michelle Gurevich ‘party girl’ sample and an Oud taqasim in maqam bayat, then my producer Lapsung ran my performance through an AI model that we’d also run my parents’ voices through. What we were left with was my performance, in rhythm and melody – performed vocally by both my Mother and Father. So you hear what sounds exactly like their own voices, saying the words they wrote for each other, in time with the song. Mixing AI technology that was invented the week we made this song, with the Oud and maqam principles that have existed for centuries, to reach the emotion I needed on this song – felt very exciting.
I can’t quite put into words how much this recording means to me. It’s something I treasure so dearly now and know I will only value more and more as time goes on. It’s a beautiful piece of music that not only my family and I can cherish, but hopefully one that inspires people to seek the kind of pure love that exists in the world at a time where so many people seem to have lost faith in it. In this song particularly, which I nearly called ‘Women & Children’ I like how my Father, a middle eastern man, is honestly portrayed as the romantic, endlessly kind, uplifting and gentle person he is. The ongoing dehumanization of middle eastern men in particular is hard to bare, when they are some of the kindest souls I’ve ever met and I wanted to tell my father and mothers story here before the final track.
“MY BLOOD, IT’S IN THE SOIL [SABA]“
Saba means longing for something/someone you will never see again. Many traditional songs written in maqam saba are about Palestine, as it speaks to themes of death and displacement, so it’s awful that in 2024 it was still relevant for me to do the same.
The message I wanted to convey with this song and its visuals was that people displaced and killed for their land will not be erased. Their blood will remain in the soil, they will be in the roots of the trees that grow there for centuries to come, and forever be felt through the air we breathe.
I wanted this song, about death, to follow track nine, about a beautiful love story – to remind people of how many beautiful love stories and lives worth living are being ended everyday. If the album restarts, then we return to Dogtooth – and the cycle of dehumanisation begins again.
