Selda
(Pharaway Sounds) Used LP $12.00
2013 reissue of the 1979 fourth album by this Turkish legend whose voice can be sultry or really surge with emotion, and when she does belt one, it’s oddly high and completely unique. Recorded when Turkey was at its most politically polarized, the album earned Selda a prison sentenced of over 500 years. A pile of acoustic guitars and bağlamas go off at once under a blanket of reverb, with lyrics about blood, wood, mountains, families, and desperate troubles — a thick squirt for a folk album. With insert booklet, liner notes.
Vurulduk Ey Halkim Unutma Bizi
(Pharaway Sounds) Used LP $12.00
“Bitter sound of the Turkish People,” a descriptor her fans (and later Selda herself) adopted to encapsulate her music’s unabashed folk intent, serves the purpose pretty well, and the phrase also relates to the considerable troubles the singer-guitarist has endured for her activism. On this 2013 reissue of her 1976 album, she conjures a potent mixture of beauty, intensity and rawness; all familiar elements to folk music of any global persuasion, as is her directness of emotion, with the whole greatly emphasizing the depth of her non-pop origins. The opening title track returns to the stripped-down mode of early singles, again just voice and guitar, but the warmly electrified and rhythmically loping psychedelia of “Utan, Utan” plainly shows that the LP wasn’t intended as any sort of conscious throwback to her career roots. And then “Askerin Türküsü” is so thick with baroque-pop ambiance one has no choice but to imagine hanging out in some dank, stately castle. Other twists are reminiscent of ambitious yé-yé productions.