Kerem Özyeğen

Kerem Özyeğen — Biography

Mazhar Kerem Özyeğen (born September 26, 1977, in Istanbul) is a Turkish musician best known as the guitarist of the rock band mor ve ötesi. After a childhood spent playing piano and listening to Michael Jackson, he turned to guitar and rock, moving through a string of Istanbul bands in the 1990s, including the punk outfit Spark, the group Siddhartha, the jazz-rock trio Crusiana, and the covers band Taxi, picking up guitar, bass and vocal duties along the way. It was as a finalist with Crusiana at the 1996 Tuborg Rock Festival that he met Kerem Kabadayı and Harun Tekin, his future bandmates.

Özyeğen joined mor ve ötesi in late 1998 and has remained its guitarist ever since, through the band's 2004 breakthrough album "Dünya Yalan Söylüyor," which reshaped how rock was received in Turkey, and its representation of Turkey at the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest in Belgrade with the song "Deli." The band has toured extensively across Europe and the United States and marked its 20th anniversary in 2016, continuing to perform live in the years since.

Özyeğen married Serbian citizen Maria Ciric in 2010, and their daughter Ayla was born in 2013. In 2015 he left Istanbul to settle in Kikinda, Serbia.