N/A(Z): Multiverse Multimedia

By Luna O’Brien

The last time I saw Naz was a year ago, charcoal liner painted under her eyes, when she slipped a paper in my hand and whispered about her secret set in a steamy New York basement. Security tried to shut it down. We, a full room of femmes shrouded in the half-dark, screeched at them until they left, flashlights limp at their side. A girl standing next to me shed a single tear. Then Naz turned back on her music, and like the sweat between us, like the flashing red strobe lights above us, like the beat, like her tongue, we purred, and shook, and moved, and pulsed. 

Courtesy of Naz Karagöz

Naz Karagöz (@naz__live) is a multidisciplinary artist and experimental performer hailing from Turkey. Lately, she's been rising in Brooklyn’s experimental techno scene for sets that charge the electricity between sonic and sensual. No easy feat in a sticky, saturated underground, but Naz has a new take on the BK underworld and its experience; during her (always live) DJ sets, Naz puts PlayStation controllers in her audience’s hands and has them explore XR (extended reality, the mother to virtual) dream worlds. 

“With everything I make, the hidden motive is that we can change. We can transform. We can alter things, and we can expand. That’s important to me. It’s so important right now with this new technology. At this time, when our relationship with technology is becoming a replacement instead of an expansion.” 

“I am in revolt of that. I want us to think of enhancement, of creating a future we actually want to live in.” 

Most worlds are 3D scans of her environment, such as an ecosystem of tree branches turned into cables. One reality trained an AI agent on lucid dreaming techniques and motif cheat codes to interpret the audience’s dreams. That set featured a meditation in its introduction to ground its listeners. 

Her electronica evokes complete immersion, each set ephemeral, produced and performed on Ableton on the foggy club floor. She couples the music with improvised Turkish lyrics or field recordings from the world around her. 

Courtesy of Naz Karagöz

Naz came up in Ankara. Her early sonic memories are her grandmother singing traditional Turkish melodies and the clinking of Rakı glasses. She was trained in classical opera and carried that pursuit to the States for her education. The rigidity and her internal revolt against it actually made me fall in love with sound.” She started listening more closely to her surroundings. “There’s so many sonic elements all around you, there’s a landscape at all times, there is music at all times.” Her first gig for Artifice featured drum racks, sounds from a monster can, tree bark, and subway cars. Her favorites to play with are her friends' voices, seashells, and alarms transformed into calm pads. 

“Almost all of my sounds—I create them. Most are field recordings. It’s–taking things that already exist in the world and transforming them, revealing the potential of things.” 

It blurs the line between programmatic and naturally alluring. Naz soaks her audience in waves of rhythm, procuring a trance, one that swirls among prayer and primal movement. Techno is supposed to be transformative, meditative, a burn mark between the ethereal and the present. 

Naz’s verse of underground is not your mainstream techno scene. You do not need substances to "feel" Naz's music. The sound alone carries you. The time and movement with the self, with the space, with the people beside you, is everything all at once. It is community and reclamation. 

“Watching everything that’s happening, especially at home, the need for transformation has been guiding me.” Her more recent performance art examined Turkish women’s silencing. While the player tries to escape the system, the screen and subject keep glitching. 

In these extended realities, Naz wishes to combine art, technology and philosophy to build more collectives, particularly sapphic-focused spaces. “Places where women can be free and do whatever the fuck they want.” A space to find alternative ways of being, to realize ideals and share them.  “Everything is logic. Anything that can be talked about can be created.”