Fasih Sayin

BLEEDING HEARTS! My new creator owned book with @StipanMorian, Matt Hollingsworth (goat), Hassan Otsmane Elhaou (Nope), coming from VERTIGO COMICS! (that has a nice ring, doesn't it?)

So...what it about? (6 page preview below)

And I suppose I’m the living proof of that.

#NiyaziSayın #TurkishMusic #Ney #ClassicalMusic #EbruArt #InMemoriam #PressFireToStart

But he was also, in many ways, an ordinary human being just like any of us.
He certainly wasn’t flawless.

He was a great artist. One who will probably never be forgotten.
He had his own style in everything.

We are always too eager to bestow divinity upon fellow humans.
All too soon we forget that divinity isn’t ours to grant.
We forget that men are mortal, fragile, fallible and far from perfection.

For those unfamiliar with his art, let me put it this way:
He was a cross between Mark Knopfler, Jimi Hendrix, and Guthrie Govan, but on ney.
Imagine all three rolled into one… then imagine something else entirely.
Something that cannot be imagined.
That was him.

Many things can be said about my father. Many can be debated.
But there’s little doubt he was the greatest ney master who ever lived.
His style was incomparable, unmistakable, and entirely his own.

Funerals have always been strange to me.
Some people attend to prove that they loved the deceased.
Some come out of a sense of duty.
Others arrive for the performance of it all... Public grief, private relief.

I was there because he was my father.

On 8 October 2025, Niyazi Sayın died.
He was a man of many talents and known by many titles.

A master of classical Turkish music.
The greatest virtuoso of the instrument called ney.
An ebru artist.
A photographer.
A painter.
And, perhaps less famously... My father.

And honestly? Refresh the Demon fit better than it had any right to.

So yeah… some people had Sonic Mayhem.
I had Jeff Waters.

Best bug ever.
#Annihilator #JeffWaters #Quake2 #RetroGaming #MetalMemories #GameSoundtracks #ThrashMetal #90sGaming #PressFireToStart

Did I fix it? Of course not.
For the rest of that session, and every one after that, Refresh the Demon became my Quake II soundtrack.

To this day, when I hear Ultraparanoia, I’m instantly back in 1998, strafing around metallic corridors, shotgunning cyborgs to Jeff Waters’ riffs.

In my case, it was Annihilator – Refresh the Demon.
The result? Quake II suddenly transformed into a thrash-metal bloodbath.

The giveaway came when vocals kicked in. Cue the moment of realization, followed by a slow-motion facepalm.

That’s where the fun part comes in:
If you left a different music CD in your drive, the game didn’t care.
It just told the computer, “Play track 6!” and your CD-ROM happily obliged, whether that was Sonic Mayhem or Slayer.

So when you played the game, your computer was essentially acting as a CD player, playing specific tracks directly from the disc.

Here’s the thing: back then, PC games came on CDs, and most didn’t actually install the entire game onto your hard drive. The soundtrack was stored on the disc itself as CD audio tracks.

And when I say “led,” I mean it literally. On Refresh the Demon, Waters is the band: Playing guitars, bass, and vocals. The only other human involved is drummer Randy Black.

So how did Jeff Waters invade Quake II?

Turns out, the song wasn’t by Sonic Mayhem at all. It was “Ultraparanoia” by Annihilator, one of my all-time favorite metal bands, led by Canadian riff wizard Jeff Waters.

Sure Quake II's soundtrack was always good but was it this good?

It wasn’t.

One evening, I’m deep into Quake II, running down endless corridors blasting Stroggs with reckless abandon, I notice something strange..
The music feels… different.
Sort of heavier... More thrashy.
More awesome if that's even possible.
I stop playing and just listen.

And then there was the soundtrack: Sascha Dikiciyan’s (aka Sonic Mayhem) early masterpiece.
Industrial, heavy, synth-driven, full of mechanical rhythm and distortion. Exactly my kind of noise.

Instead of just a series of disconnected levels, it was a world. A continuous, gritty, sci-fi playground that felt connected.
Sure, that’s standard today. But back then? That was revolutionary.

It was 1998. ICQ was still around and my nights were dedicated to Quake II.

Now, I’ve always thought Quake II got more flak than it deserved. It was a crucial step toward what we now consider the modern FPS formula.

As usual my connection is a little less sophisticated :
Quake II and Annihilator’s Refresh the Demon.

How ? I’m glad you asked.

Just the other day, my dear friend Mikael Andersson mentioned how, for him, Ayreon’s The Human Equation is forever linked with Ice-Pick Lodge’s The Void . A seemingly exquisite, surreal pairing.

YouTube video by Annihilator - Topic Ultraparanoia

Some experiences come with a built-in soundtrack. They’re inseparable.
A certain song, a particular riff, forever hardwired into your memory of a specific time and place.

youtu.be/PGJYpIZkEuw?...

YouTube video by Arjen Anthony Lucassen Ayreon - The Day That The World Breaks Down - The Source (2017)

No, it doesn’t capture everything Ayreon is, how could it?
But every journey through this galaxy starts with that first launch.

So here’s your boarding pass:
youtu.be/oFuMKdrzPqU?...
Now click on this and set your controls...

Like all great things, Ayreon is rare.
Uncommon. Legendary.

Unique.

For years, Ayreon felt like a secret I couldn’t quite share.
Until a few years ago, when the music video for The Day That The World Breaks Down dropped.

And it was worth it. One of the best shows I’ve ever attended.
Of course, I can’t tell you to “catch them when they play your town” because they don’t tour.
They perform once every few years, in one city, and tickets sell out faster than a warp jump.

By some miracle of sonic gods, I managed to get tickets to Ayreon’s 30th Anniversary show in Tilburg.
I even delayed my surgery to be there. (Yes, my doctor was thrilled to find out that I was going to a heavy metal gig instead.)

But if you’re patient, the reward is immense. Once you tune in to Arjen’s frequency, you start to realize this isn’t a band. It’s a cosmic narrative set to sound.