Baba Zula - İstanbul Sokakları, by Baba Zula

Baba Zula - İstanbul Sokakları by Baba Zula, releases 08 November 2024 1. İstanbul Express Divan Taksim 2. Arsız Saksağan (Cheeky Magpie) 3. Çarşı Pazar Bağlama Taksimi 4. Yok Haddi Yok Hesabı (No Limit No Calculation) 5. Bosphorus Cura Taksim 6. Pisi Pisi Halayı 7. Yaprakların Arasından (In Between the Leaves) 8. Güzel Bahçe Taksimi (Beautiful Garden Taksim) Veteran Turkish heads who act as a link between Erkin Koray, Can and Mad Professor." – MOJO This legendary Istanbul band remains the most experimental exponent of the hotly-tipped contemporary Turkish psych-rock scene. BaBa ZuLa are revered sonic trailblazers who have built a cult following in all corners of the globe and have counted members of Einstürzende Neubauten, Can and Nick Cave the Bad Seeds as their fans. Pulsing, hypnotic tracks powered by Turkish percussion, glitched electronics, deep bass, electric saz and dual male/female vocals. İstanbul Sokakları (Streets of Istanbul) is a vivid sonic and political statement from a band that continues to show us the future. --------------------------------------------- “We are embracing the past, and Turkish tradition,” says BaBa ZuLa co-founder and saz player, Murat Ertel. “But it’s not enough. We are living in the 21st century and we have all the world.” It could stand as the group’s mission statement. Since first coming together in Istanbul in 1996, BaBa ZuLa have specialised in transporting, psychedelic jams that incorporate electronic sounds, deep beats and supremely heavy dub vibrations, while sitting firmly within a distinctly Turkish sound. Percussion instruments such as the clopping darbuka drum and clattering kaşıklar spoons summon traditional folk-dance rhythms, while Ertel’s electrified saz conjures profound Anatolian moods with a modern, amplified twist. It’s a modus operandi that has marked them out as true iconoclasts. “Lots of Turkish musicians are fundamentalists,” says co-founder and multi-instrumentalist Levent Akman. “They want it acoustic, and they hate Murat because he plays electric. We are trying to break these kinds of borders.” Their latest album İstanbul Sokakları (Streets of Istanbul) contains no shortage of the hypnotic jams that have become their calling card. Across three extended pieces – the six-minute “Arsız Saksağan (Cheeky Magpie)”, the eight-minute “Yaprakların Arasından (In Between the Leaves)” and the eleven-minute “Yok Haddi Yok Hesabı (No Limits No Calculation)” – they delve deep into group meditations that surge and swell with relentless percussion, dark atmospherics constantly pushed into ecstatic peaks by the biting electric saz, and vocals by turns seductive and exhorting by Murat Ertel and female vocalist (and spouse), Esma Ertel. On the album we also find characteristically strong fusions of modern vibes with traditional Turkish flavours. The catchy “Pisi Pisi Halayı” features an acid house squelch ornamented with Esma’s powerful vocals sung in the zilgit style – a type of ecstatic ululation found in Turkey (Türkiye) and throughout southwestern Asia. On İstanbul Sokakları, BaBa ZuLa further pursue their quest to modernise Turkish musical tradition by examining a key element of Turkish classical music known as the taksim. Closely related to the alaap, which usually begins an Indian raga, the taksim was traditionally an improvised introduction in which the mood of a particular scale is established with melodic variations played over a root-note drone. “At the beginning of the 20th century, taksims were very popular in Turkish culture, but then this tradition slowly died,” Ertel states. “I was excited with the idea and really wanted to use it on the album.” True to form, BaBa ZuLa present a whole new approach to the taksim – as Ertel explains: “My taksims are more experimental. In tradition, the root tone is played by one or two acoustic instruments. For the album, Levent and I looked for how to make this root note come out of a synthesizer. It’s a new way of playing taksims. Maybe some traditional guys will be angry with me, but I think this is the way taksims should go.” İstanbul Sokakları presents four short but exquisitely detailed taksims built on lush, ambient drones, providing a showcase for some of Ertel’s most sensitive and delicate saz playing to date. And it's within these 21st century taksims that İstanbul Sokakları establishes another innovation, and the album’s unifying concept. Nestled among their meditative moods are a collection of field recordings which, together, sketch out a love letter to BaBa ZuLa’s home, the teeming and ancient metropolis of Istanbul. Here, Ertel draws on his own long-standing interest in recording everyday sounds, stretching back to childhood experiments with his father’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. He’s also profoundly influenced by the work of Korkmaz Çakar, a famed producer of Turkish radio plays. “He was a master of doing atmospheric sounds for these plays,” says Ertel. “I used to listen to them and, many years later, I befriended him. For the album, I use a mix of my own recordings and some of his recordings he did around Istanbul, starting in the 50s and up to today.” So, in “İstanbul Express Divan Taksim,” we hear a vintage recording of a railway announcer calling out the departure of a train leaving Istanbul for Munich. “Çarşı Pazar Bağlama Taksimi” conjures the sound of merchants in a street bazaar hawking their wares. “Bosphorus Cura Taksim,” with its boat horns and keening gulls, is redolent of that great waterway that cuts through Istanbul. And “Güzel Bahçe Taksimi (Beautiful Garden Taksim)” captures the sound of birds sweetly singing in the Ertels’ own private garden. With its focus on challenging the conservative status quo, İstanbul Sokakları explicitly addresses issues faced by progressive thinkers in today’s Turkey (Türkiye). It is, in every way, a deeply political statement. Most powerfully, “Arsız Saksağan” is an openly anti-government song fuelled by a sense of rage about the injustices of global capitalism. Ertel explains: “The wild lust of sucking every cell out of all living things by the powerful ruling class minorities and thus getting richer faster is everywhere around the world and it’s rising and rising. The prices of food and the evil ways of governments and corporations are on the rise.” Lyrically, Ertel intones a litany of disgrace, “To the media that dazzles, to the journalists who are silenced, to the people imprisoned just for defending.” But it’s not all about despair. On “Yok Haddi Yok Hesabı,” while Ertel bemoans hyper-inflation and the increasingly fast pace of the world, Esma counters by calling us to remember the true meaning of life and what really matters: “The day does not turn there, the moment is remembered… money is not valid there, glory walks in the sky of the brave.” As Ertel states: “We see and feel the injustice strongly but even under heavier pressure the resistance exists, which is so vital and gives us the courage to continue living a meaningful life.” Moreover, with the rise of the far-right across Europe, Akman is convinced it’s time for BaBa ZuLa’s message to be heard. “This album is not only for Türkiye, but for the world,” he says. “We need this kind of political album more. We’ll fight fascists and neo-Nazis with our music. All together, we must fight. And we will beat them.”