Ilker Ersin

Ilker Ersin — German bassist born in 1969 — was the bassist of Freedom Call's classic line-up, the band founded in 1998 by singer Chris Bay and drummer Dan Zimmermann. Freedom Call holds a particular place in German power metal. While Helloween and Gamma Ray worked with epic scale and speed, and Blind Guardian with literary fantasy, Freedom Call adopted from the start a frankly luminous tone — open choruses, major harmonies, optimistic lyrics. It is a style the band itself described, without irony, as "happy metal". Ersin is on Stairway to Fairyland (1999) and Crystal Empire (2001), the first two records, which set that identity. They were made while Zimmermann was combining Freedom Call with Gamma Ray, which gives the measure of how interconnected the German scene was in that period. Freedom Call went on for more than two decades and eleven records, up to Silver Romance (2024). The formula established on those first albums remained practically intact — which, in a genre that lives on immediate recognition, is less a limitation than a strategy.