IV

‘I am Istanbul,’ says Elena Hristova, the lead singer of folk-fusion band Baklava. Though she spends much of her time in Istanbul, sometimes teaming up with Istanbul underground psyche band Baba Zula, Baklava were forged in the crucible of Skopje, Macedonia, a multicultural city in the Balkans that tends eastward, pulled by the magnetic force of the Bosphorus. After dealing mainly with traditional folk songs, IV – the group's fourth album – diverges strongly from Baklava's trad-bound repertoire, offering up an eclectic batch of original songs, each rendered in a different style, from swing to klezmer, many tweaked with subtle electronica, which Hristova says is the future of Baklava.

Each song is assigned a colour. By a long shot the best song is ‘Turquoise’, a dubwise, spacey down-tempo track that blends a heavy bassline with an orbital, wonderfully evocative kanun, nostalgia-tinged, slightly Albanian-sounding clarinet and lilting Balkan-style vocals, altogether summoning up an Ottoman dreamscape seen through the prism of Macedonia. The word turquoise actually derives from the French word for ‘Turkish’, because it was the Ottomans who introduced the stone to Europe. As such, the song is a riff on a Turkish theme, a lyrical ode to a nocturnal Istanbul, which appears in the song, resplendent across the waters of the Bosphorus, like a semi-precious stone. While the album is mostly hits, there are some misses as well, for instance ‘Chocolate’, a kind of swingy sing-song ditty, with horns and some incongruous scratching going on.