She flips the screen of her laptop so her head disappears from view and Omnigard is visible. Merv Dum Demir, singer and keyboardist of the Dutch-Turkish band Aldin Gone, picks a string with a button, slides down a metal ladder with his left hand and plays a white electronic instrument. And hop, the electronic version of the desired instrument has a singing chord: piano, organ, strings, whatever you like. Usually eighties. Generic for brand new album Way Further.
But that wasn’t the case until a year ago. In Aldin Cone’s previous two albums, Ann In (2018) Night (2019), the band loved the sound a decade ago and blended Turkish traditions with funk and psyche rock. This led to international success. Night Nominated for a Grammy, they received invitations to major festivals in the United States and Japan. They booked a tour and collaborated with an exciting band called Krungpin.
I have in my head a huge reservoir of Turkish traditional music
Corona threw out what their year should be, as they each worked on a new album from home. Dostoyevsky borrowed the Omnicard from bassist and band founder Jasper Verhlst, and due to his personal homework, drum computers and synthesizers topped the list. WayTurkish traditions are still the starting point. Demir Temir worked on the songs that had been in his head since childhood. “The first three months of locking were good.”
What good is compulsion at home?
“I like to work alone. The band never had time to work on quiet music, and we were always on tour. I like to mess with a sound for three hours, which is not possible with a band in a studio room. So for those first three months I was thrilled. I think we found our own voice as a group with this album. Never before have I contributed so much to an album now. Six songs are ideas I have had for a long time. ”
Where do those songs come from?
“I have a huge body of Turkish traditional music in my head, however I actually sing a lot according to the Western pop tradition. From the moment I started to understand English, strong women like Tori Amos and Kate Bush became my role models. But I always grew up with a lot of music at home in Istanbul, mainly Turkish. songs.
“The album’s second single ‘Yüce Dağ Başında’ is a tradition hundreds of years old. I know it from my favorite movie Oh where The main character sings it while feeding the birds on the balcony. Jasper (Verhlst) sent an abyss into the 808 drum machine, it fitted exactly, I read a few disco bracelets, that’s all. We created the whole album, constantly sending ideas to each other in a dropbox. ”
Still, it must have been a disgusting year. Around the Grammy Awards, in January 2020, it was always heard that you are now really going to have international success.
“We were booked for the Coachella Festival (250,000 visitors) and Ponnaru (80,000 visitors) in the United States. We booked a studio in Malibu and are going to record an album on a California beach. We are going to tour with Grumpin and we have booked for Fuji Rock (100,000 visitors) in Japan. The latter may be possible this year, but I have little faith in it. ”
You were still able to play in the car with the Metropol band.
“We were supposed to do four shows, but the first two were canceled due to new activities. It was very difficult for me to play for such a scary, seated audience. We had a show in Belgium where everyone had to put on mouth caps. I was thinking on stage, it’s dystopia. There’s nothing fun about it. , Everyone was scared, you can not dance, do not sing together. Streaming shows are bad. I read in the comments that someone asked if we had a fight before we went on stage. No, that’s just that we do not have the energy. We use sweat for live shows. “
Some are planned for television and radio advertising. She didn’t really care about that. Rather confusion with the Omnigard at home. Totemir plays a chord from the song ‘Cara Toprock’. “It belongs to the Turkish singer and poet Âşık Weisel, which means ‘black earth’, that is, we get everything from the earth and go to it. You realize how useless and trivial all your problems are.” Automatically like the lute. She smiles broadly. “So that makes me very gen.”
Way Will be released on Friday 26th February.
