Turkish psych music from Erkin Koray

It's easy to get overwhelmed with the flood of outernational and psych reissues released these days, so here is one that's not to be missed. For 50 years, Erkin Koray has been a pioneer of Turkish rock, melding the music of his native Istanbul with Western psych, prog, swirly folky pop and funk to deliriously enchanting effect. Now, Sublime Frequencies has released a collection of Koray's rarest grooves from 1970-1977. And unlike much of the previously-available material, all of the tracks on "Mechul (Singles and Rarities)" are licensed directly from Koray himself. That means he got paid. Album preview above. Available on CD and a beautiful gatefold vinyl edition from Forced Exposure.

Also available from Experimedia.net, providers of the album preview above!

• [burgerbuilders]

  Another reason to love BB. I love turning people onto Koray. He’s one of my favorite vectors, Victor.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPgoGO-8ED4

• [ripley]

  Nice! Also maybe this will give his career the boost that the “Sufi and a Killer” album, on Warp records, did not. Since Gonjasufi & Gaslampkiller used huge sections of his music without credit this past year -and were recognied as the music’s copyright owners by Audible Magic software!

  See http://djripley.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-carve-up.html
   http://djripley.blogspot.com/2011/02/sufi-killer-guitarist-drummer-native.html
  and here  http://generationbass.com/2011/02/02/a-turk-and-a-killer-on-a-soundcloud/#

  for more on that.

• [Andy]

  Sadly, it doesn’t contain some of the best of his material. I got a CD-R copy of a mix of stuff that Sublime Frequencies dudes had collected, and it’s incredible. It’s too bad some of those tracks didn’t make it to wax, some of it I believe may be totally unreleased.

  • [David Pescovitz]

    There’s always another velvet rope, isn’t there.

• [lucero]

  As a person of Greek descent, even I can dig this groovn

• [james mcmillan]

  While not necessarily directly connected to Erkin Kovay, Finders Keepers, as well as it’s sister label B-Music re-release a lot of wonderful worldwide psychedelic rock, funk, random fuzz and forgotten soundtracks from decidedly hazier yesteryears. 
  http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/

  Really, really consistently amazing archival work being done by these guys. I would recommend checking out Sarolta Zalatnay, whose work was previously featured as a release on Finders Keepers:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdNPojbB8PA

• [ponkyo]

  There’s a really good good article in the latest issue of The Wire all about Turkish psychedelia, and an online compilation to go along with it here:  http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/8009/

  Here’s one of my favourites from Selda: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y51cPXCaZbk

• [hbgvfcdxsz hbgvfcdxsz]

  There is a hipster hiding in the comment section. Can you spot him too?

• [UncaScrooge]

  Turkish Psychedelia?  C’mon, that’s so tired now.  All the cool kids are listening to shouty French Prog like Etron Fou Leloublan, Albert Marcouer and Debile Menthol.  You can be cool too if you go and listen to that stuff right away.