Based in London, Elif Yalvaç (née Hazal Elif Yalvaç) is an electronic music composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist from North Western Turkey. She is Pathway Leader for Electronic Music at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, curator of the live electronics event series Heart of Noise (Cambridge/London) and Electronics at Eight (GSMD), and co-host of Talk to the Chip, a long-running podcast on pioneering electronic music on Resonance FM with Jono Podmore.
Her journey in sound started as a young girl getting enthusiastic about electric guitar and retro game audio. Self-taught from the age of eleven, guitar remains her main instrument alongside her analog modular synth and computer music instruments. She has had over a decade long artistic presence with international appearances, especially in the UK, Iceland and Norway, through solo and collaborative works and performances, music critic reviews, and radio features. Notable performances include UK’s Secret Garden Party in 2016, Extreme Chill Festival Iceland in 2019, Experimental Sound Studio in 2021, and most recently her own ongoing event series as both curator and performer.
Her works have been released by a number of labels including Brooklyn-based NNA Tapes, Amsterdam-based Moving Furniture Records, and Icelandic label Möller Records, alongside self-releases on her Bandcamp. Elif focuses on independent work and explores music beyond just releasing it, with solo works and modular synthesis at the centre of her current practice. She performs in solo and collaborative settings with a rig she adapts to each context: a physical modular synth, software instruments ranging from Max/MSP to Cardinal and VCV Rack to LSDJ and Renoise, guitars, pedals, a handmade synth (called Freakbox), and a Game Boy.
Besides her solo works, her collaborations have included her avant-garde metal project Diaries of Destruction (currently with her partner Jordan Muscatello), her contemporary glitch and ambient project Philamelian, Green Drift with Expert Sleepers (Andrew Ostler), Darkroom (Andrew Ostler and Michael Bearpark), and longstanding ongoing work with Morleytron (Michael Bearpark), Eraldo Bernocchi, Jon Durant, and Porcupine Tree’s Colin Edwin.
Elif holds an MA in Music (Sonic Arts) from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Music at Istanbul Technical University, with a thesis on the creative and aesthetic value of limitations in chip music, and a BA in Translation and Linguistics with a second study in Pedagogy. Currently enrolled remotely in Harvard’s CS50, she develops her own software instruments, with ongoing interests in modular synthesis, analogue signal paths, DSP and recreational maths. She teaches advanced electronic music composition and production at GSMD. Her wider interest is in music as a way of connecting with people directly, outside gatekeepers and algorithms, and in letting artistic identity develop organically.
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