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Mercan Dede Su Eagle Records, 2005
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Mercan Dede will never forget the first time he heard the ney (end-blown cane/reed flute) as a four-year-old in his native Bursa, . "They were something between aliens and angels," he says, although he wouldn't even find out the name of this magical instrument until moving to Montreal to teach media studies at Concordia University nearly two decades later. When he happened upon it again, Dede's future unfolded. The young Arkin Illicali found his Muse and this auspicious meeting of creative mind and ancient flute spawned one today's most ingenious careers in Turkish electronica.

Inspired heavily by ney player Neyzen Niyazi Sayin, and treading territory laid by such genre-bending Turkish folk stars like Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Kudsi Erguner and Talip Ozkan, Illicali's first record, Golden Horn 's traditionally-oriented Sufi Dreams, was released in 1996. He was afraid to use his own name (thinking his teachers would find it amateurish), and so picked a random moniker from the book he was reading, Ihsan Oktay Anar's Puslu Kitalar Atlesi.. The twenty-something techno-influenced hipster thought nothing of it, given Dede means "grandfather." When the album hit, however, an ironic twist of fate occurred, and this young old man became one of the shining paradoxes in future folk.

After releasing two trad recordings on Golden Horn , he moved to the innovative Doublemoon Records with 2001's Seyahatname and 02's Nar. Here Dede began injecting the airier strains of ney into softly tempered electronica. His beat selection was never meant for full-on clubbing (this he would accomplish with another pseudonym, DJ Arkin Allen, putting out '04's Fusion Monster on Numoon). Dede creates palatial landscapes with ProTools, making computer-generated rhythms sound as if performed live. His constant swirling of seeming contradictions - certainly a by-product of his lifetime devotion to Sufism, Islam's "mystic" sect - shines through every moment of his recorded works, as well as live performances. On stage the Gorgon-headed cyberpunk stands behind turntables, triggering live effects, recording musicians live and looping samples back into the mix, occasionally picking up his ney to lay down a melody over bottom-heavy beats.

Drawing from the most widespread image of Sufism, Rumi's Dance of the Whirling Dervishes, Dede takes this 700-year tradition to modern audiences with Mira Burke, a female dervish who spins superfluously to the gorgeous layers of darbouka, santur, percussion and flutes. He has created a mythological ritual for the club scene in which transcendence and simply having a good time aren't at odds, but blend unrecognizably. This decade-long journey into crafting such a show culminates (though does not end) with Su, his latest recording on Doublemoon (released stateside by Escondida).

It's always easy to say an artist's latest record is his best, as newness hits the listener in an immediate manner. The real test, of course, is time, and nearly a year after Dede handed me Su (when it was released in ), the music still holds up to the claim. Perhaps it is precisely because of what Dede dislikes most: vocalists. During our interview last July he said "What I like to do, if love is my subject, through my song, or through my sounds, I would like to make each person feel it in their own way. So instead of telling them a love story - because if you like a song with lyrics you will get bored after a few times - I give them something abstract. That way each time an image changes because you're changing. That's why sound is much more interesting to me than music: it is raw. Its organic, it changes every second."

If the lyrical contributions by Susheela Raman, Sabahat Akkiraz, Ozcan Deniz, Ceza and Dhafer Youssef are "boring," you won't notice. This is not to detract from the gorgeous instrumentals that dominate Su; Dede's ney playing add such beauty to "Ab-I Tarab" and "Ab-I Rû" you won't miss words. But when they're added - like Anglo-Indian folk interpreter Raman's melancholic growls on "Ab-I Beka" and Turkish singer Akkiraz's lilting arpeggios on "Ab-I Cesm" - the eerie textures and percussion stabs Dede contrives fill out the words well. He is interested first and foremost in the texture of sound; therefore lyrics don't act in verse-chorus-verse format, but remain improvisational in presentation without losing the coherency of well-crafted poetry. For an artist whose entire life is informed by Sufic roots - the fusion of opposites, a balance of paradox - Su is another trophy in an unending case. Only these accolades are not gold; they're intimate and inspired emotions each listener feels, inhabited by spaces only music can fill.


Contributed by Derek Beres for www.afropop.org