His debut EP, *Home: Roots*, was a more intimate proposition: four tracks, each dedicated to a family member, each rooted in the soil of personal memory. That record established the fundamental grammar of Sağcan's sound — classical guitar as the spine, orchestration as flesh and sinew — but it was, at its heart, a domestic thing. *Universes* is where the front door opens outward. The scale shifts, the palette deepens, and something genuinely surprising begins to happen.
What Sağcan has accomplished here is rarer than it sounds. He composes in a space that is notoriously easy to get wrong: the meeting point of neoclassical composition, cinematic scoring, and what might loosely be called world music. Too often, records pitched at this crossroads collapse into either the earnest blandness of spa playlists or the portentous self-importance of film composers who mistake size for depth. Sağcan sidesteps both traps almost entirely, and the reason is the guitar.
His playing is the album's conscience. Across all thirteen tracks, regardless of how grandly the orchestration swells around it — and at points it swells considerably — the guitar retains an unmistakable human temperature. It does not perform warmth; it simply has it. There is a directness to each phrase, a quality of someone actually present in the room, that no amount of orchestral layering can obscure. One thinks of the way certain jazz pianists can survive a full string arrangement because their touch is too specific, too idiosyncratic, to be absorbed by it. Sağcan has this quality on the guitar.
He is refreshingly candid about his process: the orchestrations are developed with AI assistance. This admission, which some artists would bury in small print, Sağcan states plainly. And the record itself makes the case for why honesty here matters. The AI is audible not as an intrusion but as a collaborator given precise instructions. There are moments — particularly in the darker ambient passages — where the orchestral textures achieve a granularity that would have been financially impossible for an independent artist a decade ago. The tool serves the composer; the composer has not been swallowed by the tool.
The album's range is considerable without becoming incoherent. Flamenco inflections appear, are absorbed, and recede. Chamber-music clarity alternates with cinematic sweep. Several tracks possess the introspective stillness of late Arvo Pärt, while others push toward something more propulsive and dramaturgical — music that feels like it belongs inside a narrative, which, given that *Universes* is conceived as the sonic layer of Sağcan's nineteen-book *Eleyrrha* science fiction saga, is entirely by design.
This last point deserves proper attention. Sağcan is building something unusually coherent across multiple art forms: fiction, music, and now a third album already announced for late July. *Home: Echoes* will serve as the direct soundtrack to *ANAD*, the first published novel in the *Eleyrrha* sequence. It would be tempting to view *Universes* as merely connective tissue — a bridge between the introductory *Roots* and the narratively anchored *Echoes*. That reading would be wrong. This is a fully realised work on its own terms.
There are, admittedly, moments where the album's cosmological ambition outpaces its means. A handful of the thirteen tracks feel more like mood studies than fully developed arguments, and a listener without prior investment in the *Eleyrrha* mythology may occasionally sense a door that hasn't quite opened. But these are minor cavils against a record that achieves something genuinely difficult: it makes large claims and, more often than not, honours them.
Sağcan occupies a peculiar and admirable position — a legal professional who spent two decades composing music that existed, until recently, only on paper and on strings; a novelist who writes science fiction of operatic scope; a recording artist whose first EP attracted playlist placement from Spotify's editorial team and press coverage across four continents. *Home: Universes* is the work of someone who has waited a long time to be heard and has used that time wisely.
The house, to borrow a phrase from one early reviewer of *Roots*, is worth watching. On the evidence of *Universes*, it already has several extraordinary rooms.
*Home: Universes is available now on Spotify and all major streaming platforms.*