We keep pushing.”įrom the 19 th century to the ‘60s through to today, art is a continuum and BaBa ZuLa understand that. I think there’s a consciousness awakening, but it will take time to grow. I learned that the barriers between area of art can be broken. “My father and my uncle were artists,” Ertel says. When the world is so volatile and evil can raise its head so easily, we need artists who won’t be cowed, who will be fearless and take chances. The visual elements are an important part of who we are – the presentation, the pictures, everything.”
“We used a technique from 150 years ago, a photograph taken on a glass plate that had to be prepared with silver and albumen. Even the band photo on the cover sees the past flowing into the present. It melds the past into the present and sends it flying into the future. Derin Derin is very much an album of today. The band have learned from their work with Mad Professor, and it’s definitely no exaggeration when Ertel says “our dub influences are very strong.”īut it’s dub in a new context, an experiment in music. On “Eagle Got Wolf”, for instance, phrases and riffs echo and hang suspended in the air as the bass dives and swoops, while plucked notes appear, only to flicker away again. The psychedelic sound of BaBa ZuLa also feeds quite organically into dub. Even the frequencies of the instruments are well-balanced against each other.” Nobody else has ever mixed electrified versions of these two instruments together, but it truly works. The oud is Middle Eastern and classical while the saz comes from Turkish folk music. “Both instruments are electrified,” Ertel explains, “but that’s all they have in common. And throughout their existence, they’ve kept their unique mix of electric saz and electric oud to give that double fretboard attack that’s so markedly not Western. Psychedelia seeped into his soul and helped to frame his vision for BaBa ZuLa when he formed the band in 1996. Those were the records I asked my family to buy, the ones I grew up with, alongside artists like Miriam Makeba, Harry Belafonte, and the Red Army choir.” It was wild and electric, but it kept the link to the past. “The early 45s were mostly traditional songs covered by the bands. Those rhythms form the bedrock of BaBa ZuLa’s sound, just as they were the foundation of the early Turkish psychedelia of the 1960s and ‘70s that has been a lifelong influence on Ertel. “He was like a mentor without even realising it, and he could play those Turkish rhythms excellently.” “After losing him, I understood just how big an influence he was,’ Ertel recalls. The drum part was played by Ertel’s children on a kit Liebezeit himself had modified, and Liebezeit sat in with BaBa ZuLa on many occasions. It’s a track that carries particularly profound echoes of Can’s late drummer, Jaki Liebezeit. I tried to get down everything he sang, and later I added more.” I was crying with happiness, it was such a strong experience for me. “We were at the park and I was pushing him on a swing. Ertel and his wife composed one of the pieces, and most of the words to “U Are the Swing” came from his young son. But, as Ertel notes, “Culture is danger.”Īny band becomes like a family, especially one that’s been together for more than two decades, but the sense of family took on deeper overtones for the songs here. Derin Derin is music for our dangerous times. It’s an utterly 21 st century sound, where the voices are sometimes submerged, sometimes screaming loud to breaking through the noise. “After we’d completed it, we began to think about new layers and elements we could add.” So it grew, little by little, drawing together the elements that have been the heart of the band’s sound throughout its existence: the rich wildness of Turkish psychedelia and the blinding, pure emotion that runs through traditional Anatolian music, tempered with the constant musical questing of the band’s inspiration, Krautrock pioneers Can, and the electro-dub experiments BaBa ZuLa has undertaken with producer Mad Professor. “We learned a lot about the birds while we were making the soundtrack,’ Ertel explains. It takes wing and soars high.Īnd that’s perhaps as it should be the instrumental portion of the disc grew out of music BaBa ZuLa were asked to record for a documentary about falcons. We’re an art group” And on Derin Derin, their first studio album in five years, they create their art with beautiful eloquence and stinging passion. As band founder and electric saz player Osman Murat Ertel explains: “Art is our language. It’s part of everything the Istanbul band does. For Turkey’s BaBa ZuLa, art is their existence. Kervan Yolda / Caravan On The Road (03:21)Īrt… it’s a way to keep sane in the dark times, to fight, to grasp at life. Haller Yollar / Ways & Circumstances (05:06)Ġ3.