Art… it’s a way to keep sane in the dark times, to fight, to grasp at life. For Turkey’s BaBa ZuLa, art is their existence. It’s part of everything the Istanbul band does. As band founder and electric saz player Osman Murat Ertel explains: “Art is our language. 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. It takes wing and soars high.
And 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 learned a lot about the birds while we were making the soundtrack,’ Ertel explains. “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. It’s an utterly 21st century sound, where the voices are sometimes submerged, sometimes screaming loud to breaking through the noise. Derin Derin is music for our dangerous times. But, as Ertel notes, “Culture is danger.”
Any 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. Ertel and his wife composed one of the pieces, and most of the words to “U Are the Swing” came from his young son.
“We were at the park and I was pushing him on a swing. He started singing the words to me. I was crying with happiness, it was such a strong experience for me. I tried to get down everything he sang, and later I added more.”
