Duman Duman
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post from June 14, 2024
Happy Friday to everyone! I’m traveling at the moment and want to hold on with Finnish music for a while in favor of fresh summer vibes. These days we are in Turkey - let’s explore a bit local music scene.
If you walk along the coastal line in almost any tourist seaside places, you will see a lot of restaurants with famous music screaming from every stage. Local musicians sing popular Italian songs, American songs, and everything that would sound familiar and make tourists feel good and fun. Turkey's coast is the same in a way, but it has more local features rather than other tourist places. Restaurant music is one of those.
A typical scene here is 2-3 people sitting on bank chairs on stage: a girl singer, a guitar man and it’s quite often to have a musician with saz - local variety of string instrument. Whatever they play and sing - would bring you to ancient Turkey. There is some special vibe in this geographical region called Anatolia in some sources. It sounds like Asian, but also it has a northern African influence, Moroccan notes. I can easily imagine such music being played in the light of night fireplace in a desert. You can hear the sound of wood cracking in fire, shadows of palms and tents, wind breathing, and long song, touching the deepest parts of your tired soul.
The first thing I wanted to say about it - Turkish songs are like endless unexcessive cry about life and destiny. Later I changed my mind a bit. There are sad notes of course, but it’s more about deep feelings, love, desire to feel it in full no matter what. It’s about God and devotion. Which might not be fun and fancy all the time, but brings luminous happiness hands of God.
I want to share a song from my Turkish band called Duman. I simply tried to find some popular music from Turkey and got this. Duman has these deep Turkish vibes, but also a touch of modern rock or grunge. It’s interesting to hear, it's fresh, but keeps the Turkey vibe taste. What made me smile is that members of this band lived on the West Coast quite a lot. They formed a cover band there under different name and played gigs for a while. At some point, they returned back home to Turkey and started Duman, which is considered one of the most popular local bands. To me, this music is where past and now met together.