Erkin Koray

This was freaking great…a singles comp from one of Turkey’s foremost rockers.

Erkin Koray
Meçhul: Singles and Rarities (LP)
(Sublime Frequencies)




Erkin Koray is widely regarded as the father of Turkish psychedelic rock, a polyglot stew of alternate Eastern-tinged tunings and American- and British-style guitar bravado. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing to this day, Koray has blended traditional Anatolian folk with the fuzz and swagger of amplified distortion. Like his home city of Istanbul, he stands at the conjunction of many different traditions, in geographic terms spanning the music of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, in temporal ones, the folk melodies of pre-history, the psych ferment of the 1960s, the progressive experiment of the 1970s, the new age-y ethno-explorations of the 1970s and 1980s. Using primarily Western instruments - guitar, bass, drums - but also an amplified lute-like instrument called an electric baglama, Koray juxtaposes the swirling, psychedelic excesses of Nuggets-era rock and roll with the primal longing and fundamental rootedness of Turkish folk. His music sounds at once like a lost 1960s band you never heard of, and a dazzled meander through a souk, foreign and familiar elements shifting second by second, measure by measure.

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erkin koray - mechul - singles & rarities (album preview) by experimedia