BaBa ZuLa's latest album Streets of Istanbul

AVRUPA TURKISH TIMES-Turkish-psych legends BaBa ZuLa are returning with their most atmospheric album to date, 'İstanbul Sokakları', due out 8 November on Glitterbeat. Featuring eight pulsing, hypnotic tracks powered by Turkish percussion, glitched electronics, deep bass, electric saz and dual male/female vocals, the album is a vivid sonic and political statement from a band that continues to show us the future.Nearly 30 years since their inception, this legendary Istanbul band remains the most experimental exponent of the hotly-tipped contemporary Turkish psych-rock scene that includes artists like Altın Gün, Gaye Su Akyol, Lalalar and Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek. Founded by Levent Akman (spoons, percussions, machines, toys) and Murat Ertel (electric saz and other stringed instruments, vocals, theremin), 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. 

"Arsız Saksağan (Cheeky Magpie)" (out now) is the first single taken from the album. BaBa ZuLa's co-vocalist and electric saz player Murat Ertel says about the song: "It's a groovy dance floor song with a minimalist approach that seems so rare and precious nowadays.” Ertel also adds that the track is "a strong anti-government political song about injustice and capitalism." The single is accompanied by a fascinating video, a document of protests in Turkey

Vibrant Global Sounds
BaBa ZuLa - İstanbul Sokakları
Release date: November 8th, 2024
Catalogue number: GBCD / LP / Digital 163
Album stream: https://s.disco.ac/jkkvtlumewhf
 
“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.

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“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 we 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’

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.”