Ozan Tekin is a Turkish-born, Cologne-based composer and producer whose work spans multiple genres and artistic forms. Tekin releases his solo works both under his own name and the alias Seyrek Rifat. In addition to his solo works, he works for theater, film, and TV productions as a composer and sound designer, while assisting Academy Award-winning German film composer Volker Bertelmann, a.k.a. Hauschka.
Born in Adana, Tekin started playing piano at the age of 5. This early introduction to music not only paved his way to be a composer and producer later on but also cultivated his attentiveness to the phenomenon of Sound in general throughout his life.
As a performer and a producer, Tekin has collaborated with numerous artists and bands from Istanbul’s vibrant independent music scene, including Can Güngör, Nilipek, Biz, Ars Longa, Post Dial and Yora. Additionally, he has composed music and made sound design for productions by renowned theater companies such as fringe ensemble, Why Not? Kollektiv, Studio 4 Istanbul,İkinci Kat and DasDas. These productions have been staged in prestigious international festivals in Turkey and Germany.
In 2016, Tekin created the innovative audiovisual performance project Mornings for Sale / Satılık Sabahlar. The debut performance, held at KargART in Istanbul, featured an improvised ambient set with Tekin’s “studio” set up on stage.
The following year, in 2017, Tekin released Ayrık, an EP under his singer-songwriter alias, Seyrek Rifat. He also composed music and made sound design for Burak Çevik’s debut feature film Tuzdan Kaide(2018), which premiered in Berlinale Forum 2018.
In 2019, Tekin’s debut album Pillars of Salt was released by the Cologne-based label NOORDEN. The album features a blend of ambient and experimental compositions, with dark, melancholic melodies and distorted ambient drones. It creates an atmosphere that invites freedom and artistic expression, showcasing Tekin’s skills as a producer, instrumentalist, and engineer.
In 2020, Tekin began working on his second album, Anarya, echoing a vernacular saying from his hometown Adana to make “an attempt for migrating backwards”. Tekin draws his projections over neo-classical, jazz and ambient music fading through his piano in Anarya, which is an inverted journey from Germany to Adana with a long layover in Istanbul. Released in May 2022, the album received worldwide support, with singles like “965,” “Life Blooms in Concrete,” “Irresistible Call of a Swift,” and “Ode to Being Idle” gaining airplay on major radio stations like BBC, KEXP, NTS, Worldwide FM, and Inter FM.
After the first performance in Istanbul in 2016, seven years later, Mornings for Sale / Satılık Sabahlar: No.2 took place at Niehler Freiheit in Cologne. Ozan Tekin met with Berke Can Özcan for the first time in the same space for collective improvisation.
In 2024, Tekin composed music for Türker Süer’s debut feature film Edge Of Night, which premiered at the 81st Venice Film Festival, as well as at the Toronto International Film Festival and Hamburg Film Festival later that year.