337: Port, by Forabandit

Forabandit (Turkey/France/Iran)
Port (2014)
10 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The world of musical fusions is a weird one. There are projects out there that fuse music between almost any styles or cultures that you can name, yet the successfulness of the combinations is always hard to tell just by the elevator pitch. Yes, some cultures share enough in common to make such fusions easier to facilitate from a musical point of view – Mande music and the blues, hip-hop and reggae, Hindustani and Persian classical music – but there are no combinations that are necessarily destined to work even from these. So much comes down to the individual artists taking part, their flexibility, their ability to bend their own music to another’s, and just their overall skills as a musician. And because there are so many variables, it also means that unlikely or unusual musical combinations sometimes have just as good a chance at success as the obvious ones. And so we come to Forabandit…

Forabandit’s music brings together the folk styles of Occitania and Anatolia. The band’s project is based on the idea of a shared Mediterranean culture, emphasising the connections between the people from all across the sea’s coasts who have exchanged goods, language and art through trade for millennia. Those cultures are represented in the band by Ulaş Özdemir from Turkey and Samuel Karpienia from Occitania in the south of France; the trio is shored up by Iranian percussion master Bijan Chemirani.

And – and you already knew this, because this is a blog about Good Albums – the fusion works so well that you could be convinced that the three musicians all came from the same culture, rather than those separated by thousands of kilometres of land and sea. The sounds of the instruments at play go together perfectly. Özdemir plays the Turkish bağlama in the traditional manner of the Alevi-Bektashi aşik, or wandering bards. The instrument is a long-necked lute with double-coursed strings and frets that allow for all sorts of intriguing quartertone scales. Karpienia, on the other hand, plays the mandocello, which is basically a baritone version of the mandolin, about the size of a guitar. When both of these instruments are playing together, the sound is remarkable. They are similar in many ways – steel strings, double courses – but their slight differences in tone mean that when they play together, it sounds like a weaving: a jangling, shimmering mix of high and low tones through which strands of bağlama or mandocello sometimes reach out to create an elegant thread, maybe entwining briefly with the other before settling back into the fabric. The zarb and daf drums of Chemirani hold it together with a mix of rhythms that take in patterns from Occitan, Turkish and his own Persian styles.

The album is all about these connections, in terms of its sound and its lyrics. It’s named Port, which gives you an idea – all around the Mediterranean, it is the ports that served as sites of cultural exchange and linkage. Port cities are some of the most important cultural centres around the sea for that very reason. There’s Marseille and Istanbul, which are crucial here, but it’s the same across the region: Barcelona, Naples, Oran, Beirut, Thessaloniki… That’s one of the great things about musical fusions, and something this album does so well. It highlights connections between people where otherwise they would have been unclear. In that way, ports help to create great music, but music itself can also be a port of a kind, a place where people from many different regions and backgrounds can come together and discover similarities and interesting differences, and work together to create something new in a way that benefits all involved.

296: Romantech, by New York Gypsy All Stars

New York Gypsy All Stars (USA/North Macedonia/Turkey/Greece)
Romantech (2012)
10 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify

Eastern European Romani dance music usually brings to mind powerful brass bands, frenetic fiddles or comically trotting cimbalom. The New York Gypsy All Stars take it in a very different direction.

While they keep Balkan Romani music at the core of their style, they look for connections in many directions. That way they find links in the Turkish and Greek music of their band members, and even further afield with sounds from India and Latin America. The two most prominent instruments of the quintet – Macedonian clarinet and Turkish kanun – are an unusual but ingenious paring, able between them to bend around the whole width of styles that this international exploration takes them through.

What really makes this ensemble special though, is the ‘New York’ right there in their name. They’re not just undertaking dry musical research into the roots and shoots of Romani music throughout Europe and beyond, they are a thoroughly modern and thoroughly cosmopolitan band. That means taking cues from jazz and rock, and a vardo-full of funk. Because as well as the wailing clarinet (played by Ismail Lumanovski from the Liquid Clarinets project) and tinkling kanun, it is the keyboards and bass that give the band their driving edge and add a specific acidity that they bring like no other group.

Where most presentations of Romani music on the world stage root the music in its people’s history, its folk traditions and its quirkiest aspects, the New York Gypsy All Stars prove that not only is this sort of music very much alive, but that it is also very much a part of and in tune with the plugged-in and international lives of the 2010s – and onwards.

279: Volume I, by Commodo Gantz Kahn

Commodo Gantz Kahn (United Kingdom/Turkey)
Volume I (2015)
6 tracks, 24 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The producers Commodo, Gantz and Kahn are three of dubstep’s biggest names of the past decade, and Volume I, their first three-way collaboration, was always going to be a release with expectation on its back – this was the biggest supergroup the scene could have hoped for.

Now, you see, I’ve just typed that last sentence, in the full knowledge that I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s the vibe that I get from reading about the release, anyway, but I have to say I’m not as up on the comings and goings of dubstep as I’d like to be. And I would like to be. When I listen to good dubstep it hits me hard and makes me wish I’d been totally immersed in the scene since its late 90s inception. What I lack in the intimate knowledge and vocabulary of dubstep, I make up for in just thinking ‘oh my god this is so sick!’ at the top of my mind-voice when I hear it. I know what I like, and Volume I is exactly that.

This album is an amazing journey of sound and it doesn’t even clock in at half-an-hour. There’s no doubting the dubsteppedness here – the pulse is slow, the producers use of layered delays and reverb are enough to rival the classic Jamaican studios and the bass is suitably cavity-worrying – but there’s also a refreshing lack of cliché at work. For starters, they employ hardly any of that stereotypical dubstep wobble-bass. This isn’t party music, either. No happy-go-lucky, carefree dance party anyway. The music here is dark, intense and menacing. You’ll be dancing to it, but you’ll do it with a moody expression on your face.

What it does have is a very strong Middle Eastern feel. Although Istanbul native Gantz has the most obvious connection, each of the producers had worked sounds from across the region into their work before (he typed, in the full knowledge that he had no idea what he was talking about), but for this album, it forms the basis of each composition. Synths that echo the qanun zither or ney reed flute; samples of Turkish singing and sweeping Egyptian string orchestras warped and distorted into unsettlingly slow melodies and ominous drones; electronic and affected beats undergird rhythmic flourishes from darbuka (goblet drum) and riqq (tambourine); mountains of minor seconds, minor sevenths and major thirds that turn it all into an otherworldly hijaz – the Middle East is there in every element, and they fit so comfortably within the dubstep milieu that I’m astounded that there isn’t already a huge scene devoted to just this fusion.*

Volume I is the perfect soundtrack to watching a storm roll in from the horizon on a warm day, seeing the sheets of rain and feeling the peels of thunder in your belly. I know, because it was the album on the speakers while me and my mates hurriedly packed down our barbecue while casting worried glances at the churning sky in the distance getting closer and closer. Commodo, Gantz and Kahn’s beats and bass gave it all a suitably apocalyptic edge and definitely made us all feel a little like we were in a cool thriller film.

Even though I know so little about the dubstep scene, I’m glad that I have the wits to recognise a real musical event when I hear one, and this wonderful album certainly lives up to the reputations of its three big-name producers. It’s just a shame it’s so short. No Volume II seems to be out there yet, but I check diligently. Until then, turn off the lights, turn up the bass and fall into another world – for 24 minutes.


* If there is, why didn’t you tell me? I want to be invited to your parties!

276: Hologram İmparatorluğu, by Gaye Su Akyol

Gaye Su Akyol (Turkey)
Hologram İmparatorluğu (2016)
12 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The past four or five years has seen an explosion in the retro-styled Turkish psychedelic scene. Sounds niche, right? But the number of artists in that niche – from Turkey and elsewhere – with booming international careers seems to keep rising: younger groups such as BaBa ZuLa, Altın Gün and Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek command hardy followings and undertake hardcore tour schedules, and stars from the original 1970s scene such as Selda Bağcan and Moğollar are getting used to a new-found worldwide audience due to a bunch of reissues and compilations. Even comedian Stewart Lee did a bit in his 2017 show Content Provider about the style, name-checking Moğollar, Selda, Erkin Koray and Toz Hasat along the way.

One of the most successful artists from this unexpected resurgence is Gaye Su Akyol. She’s often referred to as the sound of young Istanbul, but her sound owes a lot to those retro stars. Bağlama and oud and plucked alongside warped surf guitars, frame drum rhythms are bolstered by tight kit drumming, and Akyol’s throaty and thickly-vibratoed voice swoops over it, reminiscent of Turkish classical singers. There are also elements of film-score like string orchestras, Latin rhythms and dabs of electronica to mix things up too. While she uses many retro sounds in her music, there’s a powerful modernity to it.

Akyol’s style allows European and American listeners to approach Turkish music in the way that she herself approached rock. Her core influences are actually artists like Nirvana, Nick Cave and Jefferson Airplane, but in the way she first heard them – relating them in her mind to the older Turkish music she’d grown up with. It makes sense, too: Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ would fit alongside any Turkish psych compilation with ease. Now we get to hear those sounds parsed back through the same filter.

As her first international release, Hologram İmparatorluğu was a revelation and a powerful announcement of her arrival. The music was as striking as her on-stage presence and in the same manner – her fashion sense seems set at least 20 years in the future…or perhaps it’s a 1970s view of 2030s fashion. It’s all about looking back and looking far forward at the same time to make insightful – and not to mention insanely groovy – statements about the present.

What about the shared zeitgeist of the ultra-hip across Europe and Anatolia has led it to pick up on those intergalactic sounds of 1970s Turkey all the way over here in the 2010s? I won’t pretend I know any further explanation than ‘cos it sounds great’ and that’s good enough for me. And if it’s bringing around such cool artists as Gaye Su Akyol, we surely can’t have any complaints.

259: H, by Grégory Dargent

Grégory Dargent (France)
H (2018)
7 tracks, 40 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

H is a multimedia art project from L’Hijâz’Car bandleader and oud player Grégory Dargent, of which this album is only half. Together with a 112-page book of artful, haunting photographs taken by Dargent himself, this music is a meditation on the nuclear bomb tests conducted in the Algerian Sahara in the 1960s and their impacts on the land, nature and the local nomadic peoples. Dargent created the project after learning about the tests in 2013 and visiting the sites and speaking to the people in Reggane and Tamanrasset in 2017.

The album is created by a trio of Dargent on oud and electronics, Anil Eraslan on cello and electronics and Wassim Halal on Arabic drums and percussion. As with the subject matter, the music of H is harrowing. Its concept was to sound irradiated, and this is achieved with unsettling accuracy. Between the trio’s acoustic instruments they create a style based in equal parts on Arabic and European classical music and Maghrebi folk music, but the introduction of electronics changes and corrupts those traditions with acrid and abrasive noise, turning it at points nearly into non-music.

Despite, and in a way, because of, its disturbing and distressing element, this album becomes strangely beautiful. The ethereal art music struggles against the ugliness of the electronics as the natural struggles against the artificial, a fragile rose blooming from cracked concrete. This music is despair and hope, pain and healing, loss and regrowth. H is a powerful listen and its sonic journey is not one to take lightly, but it is an important one to take nonetheless. Through image and sound, Dargent has created an incredibly impactful work of art.


Image © Grégory Dargent

078: Dewrane Dewrane, by Burhan Toprak

Burhan Toprak (Kurdistan/Turkey)
Dewrane Dewrane (2014)
5 tracks, 62 minutes

This is a difficult one to talk about, because I’m not sure really where my version of this came from. Well, I do, it was a CD-r in a big box of other CD-rs, but I mean, I don’t think this is a real album, probably more likely to be a sampler. I can’t even find all of the tracks online anywhere. So what I’ll do is send you to a couple of his other albums on Spotify: Dewrane Dewrane (2013) and Daweta Gel, Vol. 1 (2016), and if you want to take a listen to my version, I can send it to you, just let me know.

As you can tell by the vagueness of that introduction, I really don’t know much about Burhan Toprak, or this music in general. As far as I can tell, Burhan and his group Roj Müzik play Kurdish wedding music in Turkey. The repertoire is all based on traditional songs and melodies, but they’ve made it super poppy. That means lots of cheesy synth chords and drum machines. But what I find really enticing about this music is Toprak's electric bağlama. The instrument already has such a lovely sound in its acoustic form, with its double courses of strings, open tuning and microtonal frets; the electric version, played with loads of distortion, adds an extra dimension again.

The recorded work is one thing, but I would love to attend a wedding with this guy. Check out this footage from an event in 2016:

Without all the way-too-cheesy add-ons of the recorded stuff, the ensemble of vocals, electric bağlama and drums is much more exciting, and allows Toprak to show off his skills more too. I’m quite amazed at how civilised the dancing stays to be honest – I reckon I’d be whipped into a frenzy in the right surroundings.

I know that in the past few years, Roj Müzik have been trying to break out onto the international scene, performing in concert settings for world music audiences as well as at Kurdish and Turkish weddings, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be going too well for them. In fact, the only update I can find in English on the web was from 2017, when the group were apparently invited to perform at SXSW but then denied the necessary visas. I really hope that Roj Müzik and Burhan Toprak do end up making some in-roads within the international scene soon. I’d love to see them live – and learn more about them and their music!