Dead at Dawn - Synth VIP

Madiba

High Quality

Yalansın Dünya

TRACKLIST
01. Acid Pauli - Jamie and Selda
02. Mehmet Aslan - Raptiye Rap •HIGHLIFE 02•
03. Acid Pauli - Fuck The EU!
04. Mehmet Aslan & Dario Rohrbach - Gazel (STW Premiere)

Acid Pauli B2B Mehmet Aslan

Few artists can claim to have their own distinctive “musical voice”: a style of composition and production that listeners instantly recognize. For starters, it takes years of experimentation to perfect, and most people simply don’t have the patience, talent or skills to pull it off. 

Ali Kuru is one of those rare producers whose music sounds like nothing else around. The Istanbul-based artist has spent the best part of a decade honing his trademark style – a fragrant and intoxicating aural brew that combines a myriad of influences with atmospheric field recordings and snaking, mind-altering Middle Eastern instrumentation – via releases for the likes of Luxa Flex, Kalisah, Sound Architecture and, most recently, Leng. 

It’s to the latter label that the publicity-shy producer returns with his most ambitious release to date, Egzotik. 15 tracks and 70 minutes deep, it’s not so much a debut album as a statement of intent. From start to finish, it feels like a humid, sweat-soaked saunter through the winding streets of Istanbul in the company of a musician who draws more inspiration than most from his immediate surroundings. 

Those surroundings come to the fore on opener “Bazaar”, where tipsy horns and gently strummed electric guitar passages slowly rise above the sound of a harbourside market. 

They’re present, too, within the souk rhythms and cascading pianos of “Zorba The Greek”, beneath the gentle throb of “Lost Bedouin”, inside the spaced-out, stargazing pulse of “Hiyar”, and around the chiming melodies and mournful strings of hushed ambient closer “Adios”. 

Kuru’s genius lies in his ability to take familiar musical tropes and twist them into unique, Ottoman-inspired shapes. So, while “Tangerine Dream” doffs a cap to the stretched-out hypnotism of the legendary krautrock band of the same name, its reliance on backwards drum hits, locked-in grooves and psychedelic sample loops is a far more contemporary proposition. 

Some may hear the influence of Detroit beatdown in the slow and dubby house grooves of “Le Voyage De Space”, while others could describe the drowsy “Ashoka” as being Weatherall-esque. Yet none of these tracks, layered as they are with traditional Balkan, Persian and Arabic instrumentation, sound like anything other than Ali Kuru productions. 

The result is an album that surprises and enthralls in equal measure. Highlights come thick and fast, from the bubbling, dub-house psychedelia of “Mount Damavand” and haunting deep techno humidity of “Sacred Vallley”, to the Augustus Pablo-in-Ankara shuffle of “Jungle Flower” and potent hookah hit of “Return to Paradise”, where sampled voices rise above a typically tactile groove.

07 - Ali Kuru - Hiyar

Original Songwriting and Vocals by: Tuğçe Kurtiş, https://soundcloud.com/tugce-kurtis
Production by: MiRET, https://soundcloud.com/miretmusic
Cover Art by: Scott Partridge, http://jevaart.com/

Lyrics:
Bir gün sen henüz uyurken
Kim bilir hangi düşlerde
Uzun ve sessiz yüzüne baktım
Ve belki masaldır dedim
Belki kıyıya vuran dalga
Belki dalgadaki gemi
Belki gemideki güvercin
Belki güvercinin sesi
Belki şarkımla yeniden doğan güneş
Belki güneşin ötesi
Belki de küçücük bir kıvılcım hayat
Belki bu da bize yeter
 
English Translation:
One day while you were asleep
Who knows in what dreams
I took a long and quiet look at your face
And said maybe it is a fairytale
Maybe it is the wave that hits the shore
Maybe the ship on that wave
Maybe the pigeon on that ship
Maybe the voice of that pigeon
Maybe the sun that is reborn with my song
Maybe even beyond the sun
Maybe it is a tiny sparkle, this life
Maybe that is sufficient for us

Kalk Gidelim

KURT ADAM

Recent comments

Bulent Fani

Musicocrats

chöko aba

mountain noise

Related tracks