Derya Yıldırım und Die Group Şimşek
Photo: Facebook
“What if there is no tomorrow?” This is what the Berlin musician Derya Yıldırım asks on her new album “Yarın Yoksa”. At least the Turkish title can be translated into German. And in fact, the psychedelic music to be heard on it is also focusing its focus and her engaging, characteristic aura entirely on the here and now.
At the center of her texts is the question of home and identity. The sound of Yıldırım and the Grup Şimşek – according to your band – testifies to the dialectical tension of this topic: On the one hand, because on the one hand the quartet sees itself in the tradition of the Anadolu Rock of the 1970s. On the other hand, this genre, the East and West, Anatolian folklore and western rock music combines, is the best proof that the question of identity and belonging is usually not so easy to answer. As is well known, Goethe, who stated in his “Divan” a good 200 years ago, knew that that the Orient and Occident could no longer be separated.
But Yıldırım knows what Goethe knew for a long time. In the mid-1990s, she was born as the daughter of a family of guest workers in the third generation in Hamburg. There she came into contact with the Bağlama early through her father, an anatolian string instrument, which she fascinated so sustainably that in 2013 she finally became the first and only student in Germany that the instrument chose as the main subject.
Already on the three predecessor plates it has decisively shaped the sound of the band. On “Yarın Yoksa” it even takes up a more prominent place than before. Already in the funky advance of “Cool Hand” Yıldırım solves as virtuoso as casually that the question of the above and bottom after listening to the song is no longer as clear. But what is not too bad, because in the transcendental sound cosmos of the band there are such orientation categories yesterday anyway. In the course of the album, she then presents the band stylistically broadly: “Bilemedim Ki” and “Yakamoz”, for example, are mixed, accusing ballad. In the latter, Yıldırım sings the feeling of uprooting. “Donemem Evime, Bir Daha Bakamam Geriye,” it says (“I can no longer go home/I can’t look back”). “Hop Bico”, on the other hand, radiates a refreshingly naive confidence together with its children’s song-like melody and choral passages, while songs like “Yüz Yüze” suggest that the musicians involved have heard of one or the other record of 60s bands such as The Doors or Jefferson Airplane over the past few years. Last but not least, the vintage sound, which the band has recorded for the first time far from the European continent in New York together with Leon Michels, also contributes to this impression. The washed -out sound character increases the feeling transported by the music that the past is irretrievably lost, which, thanks to the exceptional music Yıldırıms, creates an irritating well -being.
Derya Yıldırım & Group Şimşek: »Tomorrow or« (Big Crown Records)
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