Album Review: Yol by Altin Gün

The garish hazy luminosity of eight golden orbs brightens a moonlit aqueduct on the illustrated cover of Altın Gün's third album Yol, telling you that the live favourites have ditched the dusty flangers, clangers and flared desert rock of their robust past in exchange for something even more fundamental and energetic, adopting elements of twangy cosmic disco and new romantic pop. Immaculately produced by the Gent electronic duo Asa Moto (whose genius 2018 track Kifesh fans will recall already headily transplanted Donna Summer in the Sahara) the Dutch and Turkish musical collaborators have once again successfully captured the spiritual, nostalgic and avant future and past of contemporary Anatolia. Merve Daşdemir beckons you in on the opening teaser Bahçada Yeşil Çınar before the groove properly kicks in with Ordunun Dereleri, a laid back composition suggestive of a vanished past invigorated by Erdinç Ecevit's gilded velvet timbre, cut ups of traffic noise and dripping synth pulses.

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Altin Gün's third album arrives with the same mysterious allure as a weirdly shaped parcel found under the Christmas tree. Trapped in lockdown, Amsterdam's finest Turkish psych revivalists started tinkering with drum machines and electronics, adding the spacey synth strut of early-'80s disco to their hallucinogenic rock/folk stew. The prospect sounds so charmingly idiosyncratic on paper that you almost dread to press play, for fear that reality will disappoint.

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