I discovered Altin Gün one fateful Osheaga, coming up on a nice dose of festival party-favours. The set is kind of a blur, but listening to Garip immediately pulled me back into the Arabic desert. Altin Gün — five Amsterdammers who dream, apparently, in Turkish microtones — have given us their sixth album, a tribute to the great folk bard Neşet Ertaş, and it is the most beautiful haunting I have experienced in recent memory.
The opener, “Neredesin Sen,” asks Where are you? The bass answers first, throbbing upward from somewhere beneath the floorboards of the universe. The drums arrive next, two friends who have been walking for forty years and do not need to speak. By the time Erdinç Eçevit’s vocals enter, you have already forgotten where you were. Where are you? You think, and you cannot quite remember.
Track three, “Öldürme Beni” — Don’t Kill Me — is not about being killed. It is about the moment just before, which lasts forever, which is psych-pop or the synth line that inserts itself into your chest cavity and hangs there like a small chandelier. At the album’s centre sits “Suçum Nedir” — What Is My Crime? — and here time becomes elastic, stretches pink and translucent in the saxophone light, then contracts. Pink Floyd understood something like this once. So did the steppes. So, it turns out, did the Stockholm Studio Orchestra, whose string arrangements on this record are the sound of clouds learning to be rooms.
Eçevit has said that Turkish folk music is the blues of the Turkish people, and listening to Garip, one understands that blues is not a feeling but a geography — a specific country located somewhere between longing and the body. Altin Gün are its restless, funky cartographers.
