Whereas the first albums had more to do with retro futurism, in Anadolu Ejderi (Anatolian Dragons), past and present collide beguilingly as Gaye Su Akyol jumps on the Anatolian wagon, pushing it further with self named title track, setting high expectations via bold synth flash, fierce drum roll, punchy guitar lines and haunting refrain. At last Gaye Su Akyol has delivered a made-to-measure ...
The deeper I got into the Balkans the more I began to feel the magnetic pull of Istanbul. As of Novi Pazar, everything started to tilt towards the Bosphorus. The food, the music, the language, the mannerisms, all began to assume a Turkish touch. I realized that if ever I were to unwind the knotty issue of the Balkans in my ...
I have to say that Kolektif Istanbul was one of the reasons I moved to Istanbul in 2011. A year or two before I packed up and left I caught a gig of theirs at Kreuzberg's Ballhaus Naunyn, which was supposed to wrap up the theater festival, Diyalog. The band rocked the house with their brand of “Turko-balkanic progressive wedding ...
You could say that all big cities are, by their very multifaceted natures, places of contrast. This holds true about New York, London, Berlin... The list goes on. And yet it appears to me that Istanbul is more than any other place, a city of paradoxes. It is at once, European and Asian, rich and poor, old and new, hot ...
Berlin is a swamp: literally, figuratively, and etymologically (Brlo - old Slavic for swamp). It will suck you down if you are not careful - and sometimes you just need to escape to save your soul. I have been plotting my escape for a while now, even without knowing it. Sometimes I think Belgrade would be a nice place to get ...
Whenever I visited my grandmother in Istanbul, Aksaray, I simply had to check out the scene on Istiklal Caddesi. Mostly, I walked there. Back then there was no tram and I didn’t really fancy taking the bus. So I walked past Istanbul University, where my mother studied, then either through Kapalı Çarşı (Grand Bazaar) or past the Sultan Ahmet Cami ...
When it comes to Istanbul’s nightlife, many usually think of Taksim – that stretch of European Istanbul, north of the Golden Horn, intersected by the Istiklal Caddesi a pedestrian thoroughfare which slices through the district of Beyoğlu from Taksim square in the north to Tünel in the south. Here, and in its dozens of tributaries and small, dark side streets, was where – up ...