Lingering, Grey-Sky Turkish Psychedelia and Spacerock From Minor Empire

by delarue

Minor Empire play a spare, psychedelic, electric rock take on Turkish music with occasional echoes of jazz. Their slowly unwinding songs tend to be on the overcast side. Their album Uprooted is streaming at Spotify – and there’s a very useful English ltranslation at the group’s lyric page.

The album’s first track, Istanbul dan Uskudar a Yol Gid, begins with a hypnotically pinwheeling baglama riff. From there the band ease their way into a slow, moody, chromatic sway behind Ozan Boz’s lingering electric guitar, frontwoman Ozgu Ozman’s voice wafting gently over a tricky, insistent rhythm from Chris Gartner on bass and Ben Riley on ominous, boomy drums.

Mendilimin Yesil is a spacious mashup of psychedelic rock and jazz, with Lina Allemano’s lingering trumpet, staccato wah-wah guitar and Ozman’s delicately ornamented, melismatic vocals. Gunes Turkusu builds from simmering layers of guitar, through drifting spacerock to a snarling coda, and then comes full circle. If U2 were Turkish (and had a good singer), Yutsuz, with its elegant bass descending to downtuned murk, could be an atmospheric tune from Tıkırtı ve Vızıltı (that’s Rattle and Hum in Turkish).

Awash in rising and falling pings, pulses, resonant guitars and chiming baglama, Ag Elime Mor Kinalar Yaktiar brings to mind Australian spacerock legends the Church. Ozman’s voice rises more insistently in Iki Kekik, one of the album’s more minimal numbers. At the end of Dunya, a hypnotically crescendoing instrumental, the guitar finally hits a mighty, surfy clang: it was worth the wait!

They follow that with Tohum, a brief, allusively anthemic tableau, and stay in moody, atmospheric mode with Bahar. The mini-suite concludes with the echoey wave motion of Babam.

With its web of kaleidoscopic textures, Selanik Turkusu is arguably the album’s trippiest and most enigmatic number. The starry, atmospheric Uyuttum Atlari has tinges of Asian folk music. The group wind up the record with Tutari Yar Elindem, the guitars taking over after Ozman’s finished with a circling, pensive theme. Turkish psychedelia has a long and rich history and this album is a welcome addition.