Maslak Halay1

The whole sound of Ayyuka is summed up in the title of their fifth album; halay, aficionados of Turkish and Kurdish music will know, is the name of a popular circle-dance common at Turkish and Kurdish weddings and maslak is a somewhat sterile and soulless municipality of Istanbul, famous for its shopping malls. Thus, the album is a mixture of tradition and modernity – the inescapable dichotomy of Turkey itself. ‘We later learned’, says drummer Alican Tezer, ‘[maslak] also means drug dealing in another district's slang.’ The drug connotation feels appropriate. Ayyuka, explains Tezer, ‘means the highest point in the sky, and also to break through it, Break on through to the other side. Indeed, Ayyuka is full of spacey distortion, cosmic freak-outs, gnarled guitar lines, far-out fuzz, wah-wah licks, heavy, brooding moments and complex feedback at the pluck of a string.

The sound is suggestive of a kind of sensory derangement but it doesn't mean one has to be high to enjoy it. Anyone who digs Anatolian psych in the vein of Erkin Koray or neo-psych group Altin Gun will enjoy this album. And it has the added virtue of being entirely instrumental – a conscious decision on the part of the band to appeal to international audiences.