Laterna

Beginnings

Özge Ersu's close ties with public radio began on 2008 in London while on tour when he met Ahmet Yeşiltepe, a successful Turkish journalist and anchorman of Ntv Radio and Television. Under Yeşiltepe’s supervision, a very popular disc-jockey, composer and sound engineer Selami Bilgiç was assigned among Ntv radio’s staff as the senior technical editor of the program.

After a brief experimentary broadcast for London, Paris and Rome, Özge Ersu has rapidly established a brand-new concept on Ntv Radio,focusing on the music composed for historic events, places, cities and musicians of mentioned places. During the first two years of the program's history, this novelty city-based template was later stretched to countrywide programs such as Switzerland, Norway, Cuba, Iceland and similar.

Audience and Success

Since then, Laterna has become one of public radio's most successful documentary musical radio programs at Turkish broadcasting history, targeting only a very high intellectual level of audience. The program, being one of the forerunners of its own genre, quickly received a warm welcome and enjoyed extensive success. Özge Ersu, himself a laureate lyric writer an amateur blues drummer is widely known for his laudable usage of the Turkish language, as well as his extensive musical and historical knowledge on Blues, Jazz and Old School Rock, Pop, Classical and Turkish music, that contributed to this achievement.

Having a very large number of fans from Turkey and all around the world from different profiles, the audience involves teachers, musicians, students, executives as well as housewives and children.

Awards and Accolades

Laterna is widely considered as the Most Favourite Radio Program of Turkey among the radio audience,the program fans and followers.

Laterna has twice been the candidate for prestigious Sedat Simavi Radio Awards in 2009 and 2011.

Laterna has received ‘Tureb 2011 Sustainable Broadcast Success Award acquiring the first place by far in open vote polls.

TUREB, The National Federation of Tourist Guide Guilds and Associations has presented the award to Özge Ersu at the World Tourist Guides Day Ceremony held on February 21, 2012 'at İstanbul Haliç Congress Center. Click here for the video of the Awards Ceremony.

Laterna has been awarded Kalid Crystal Gull 2012, assigned by Kalid.

Content

Besides the informative narration, interesting facts, impressions and the memoirs of Özge Ersu, each of the broadcast twenty-five programs comprise songs, poems and essays for the subject matter. The content also involves interviews with well-known historical figures, famous stars and celebrities, created by Özge Ersu's self-conversations that require intricate recording capabilities using detailed sound processing sessions, morphing techniques and studio effects.

The program is also backed up by an imaginary time-traveller correspondent that reports important historical or musical events, joining the radio broadcast live, with an old-style cellular phone on a low-debit connection.

Episodes

Throughout Laterna’s history going back to four years, Özge Ersu has created and narrated total of twenty-five legendary programs with a total of around 35 hours runtime. The list of programs, broadcast dates and running times are listed below.

Podcasts

All broadcast podcasts are available for streaming, and downloading at Özge Ersu's official homepage for Laterna.

Cast

Besides Özge Ersu as the presenter, producer and narrator, Laterna cast at Ntv Radio included Selami Bilgiç as the master technical editor, supported by the broadcast engineer Ufuk Tangel and radio director Safiye Kılıç between 2008 and 2014.

Musicians

Jazz, Blues, Rock, Classic and Pop artists, singers and groups include, but not limited to:

Local Artists, Poets and Real World Recordings

Turkish singers, groups, composers and narrators include:

Zeki Müren, Berkant, Ajda Pekkan, Moğollar, Dario Moreno, Fikret Kızılok, Tanju Okan, Dede Efendi, Neşe Karaböcek, Ersan Erdura, Zülfü Livaneli, Dario Moreno, Leman Sam, Müşfik Kenter, Erol Evgin, Edip Akbayram, Grup Gündoğarken, Mazhar Fuat Özkan, Barış Manço, Alpay Nazikioğlu, George Winston, Handan Kara, Yeni Türkü, Grup Lodos, Volkan Gücer Neslihan Yanardağ.

Turkish and foreign poets included in the programs are:

Ümit Yaşar Oğuzcan, Nazım Hikmet Ran, Orhan Veli Kanık, William Shakespeare, Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

Also, real-world recordings of celebrities like:

Evita Peron, Fidel Castro, Ian Anderson add juice to this content.

Archive and Cooperation

Holding digitally stored sixteen terabytes of extensive high-quality music and sound archive of around 250.000 pieces, historical speeches, sound effects and background music banks, Özge Ersu locates almost any piece of music written for many places and their people, as well as expanding his personal archive after each and every visit to different destinations by buying music or recording sounds in-situ.

At times, various radio channels such as Radio Voyage, Virgin Radio, Radio Eksen, Kıbrıs Bayrak Radyo ve Televizyonu cooperate with him to compensate the missing songs and files. Furthermore, singers, composers, local people and libraries contribute to his content with copyrighted music or live recording sessions, whenever needed.

Future of Laterna on the Radio

In the near future, Laterna will sit tight broadcasting for another season or two on Ntv Radio channel. San Francisco, Mexico and Northern Cyprus are already in project line until the end of the current season in July 2012.

Laterna Forbidden Documentaries Cinema Series

Planned for 2015–2018, Özge Ersu is in the stage of transforming the program to an independent documentary cinema under the name Laterna: The Forbidden Documentaries as the writer, producer and narrator of the series. These documentaries will be concentrating on human conflicts from all around the word, such as 'Cyprus - Digging for the Lost', 'Sworn Virgins of Northern Albany' and 'Black Magic Muti Killings' in Africa, etc.