Anadolu-Post-Punk-it sounds better in Turkish

Derya Yıldırım, Altın Gün, Baba Zula: The list of current artists who are in the traditional line of the Anadolu Rock of the 60s and 70s is long and is getting longer. Then, as now, elements of classic anatol folklore culminate in this sound with modern rock music, which is sometimes also oriented west. In January, “Köşk”, the debut album of Sinem, was released at the trendy Berlin label Fun in the Church. The trio from Munich already played almost 20 appearances last year, and it is currently receiving a booking request for the next-from Germany, but also from abroad. And that after the band was founded less than one and a half years ago.

She has not yet sent a concert request, says namer Sinem Arslan Ströbel, who works full -time as a book. Therefore, she knows how unusual the high demand for a newly founded band is. But how did it come about? Ströbel cannot really explain that. The fact is: her roommate at the time, who, who was extremely busy in the Munich subculture, heard you singing in the next room on a cloudy autumn day – somewhere in October 2023. At that time she practiced a song that she wanted to present on her grandma’s 80th birthday, a so -called guest worker of the first generation. In a small, private setting, far from the public, a unique story.

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But it turned out differently. Because shortly afterwards WU came up to her. “Let’s go to the rehearsal room, and then we try,” he suggested. The first three songs were rehearsed within two weeks. The project was finally completed by the guitarist Martin Tagar, whom some should know through his participation as a bass player at the post-punk band Friends of Gas. His repetitive-reduced game fits seamlessly into the Rhythmic sound of the band, in which the drums are heavily mixed into the foreground. As with his main band, Tagar also plays hypnotic grinding, which are stuck in the auditory courses and decisively shape the character of the songs.

For example in the song »that the«, the opener of the album. Driven by a whipping beat, the trio really plays into rage. If you then compare the song with the gentle, folkloristic original of the Turkish poet singer Aşık Mahzuni Şerif, you first think you can hear a completely different song. Only the striking guitar melody builds a connecting line between then and now. The trio, on the other hand, is more groovy in songs such as “Gurbet” or “Yaz Gazeteci Yaz”, in which deep synthesizer traces come into play. In longer pieces such as “Sivas’ın Yollarına” or “Lambaya Tüf de” it is again atmospheric, almost balladesk for sinems.

With her mixture from Post Punk and Anadolu Rock, Sinem connects to a traditional line of tradition, which was underexposed in Germany for a long time. It is not the case that there would have been no artists in this country who have moved in these sound spheres, on the contrary. Yüksel Özkasap, Ozan Ata Canani, Cem Karaca or Aşık Metin Turköz – they all lived and played in West Germany from the 1960s and had some of the audience. Some of them – like Canani – came to Germany with their parents, who were hired here as guest workers. Others, such as Karaca, followed later due to political persecution in Turkey. They all united that they played Gurbetçi songs, ie “songs from the stranger”. In them, they negotiated universal issues such as freedom, solidarity, sincerity and humanity, which, even today, almost 60 years later, lost none of their topicality.

The documentary »Aşk, Mark Ve Ölüm-Love, D-Mark and Death« by Cem Kaya from 2022, similar to the music of Sinem, has a large part in the rediscovery of the Gurbetçi songs. 60s to the present. The film also impressed her at the time, says Arslan Ströbel. She already knew artist from the film like Cem Karaca: they ran up and down in their parents’ house and up and down with their grandparents.

Singing in German is not an alternative for them, even if they master the language much better, says Ströbel. But her voice just likes her in Turkish, she says in the conversation: “It may be a cliché, but in the end it is simply a difference whether you grow up with two cultures or not.”

Sinem: »Köşk« (Fun in the Church)