Su
Turkey has recently emerged as a world-renowned musical hot-bed. Ancient styles from the region are robust and varied but new sounds from the clubs of Istanbul are considered especially seductive. Mercan Dede, who now resides in Montreal, is a cutting-edge Sufi Dervish, a Turkish-born composer, DJ and producer with spiked hair and several identities. The album's title translates to "water" and it consists of meditations inspired by the Bosphorous Straits. Realized by give-and-take between traditional strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion along with airy, droning electronica, the music flows in ripples, evoking tidal ebbs, surges and cresting, hissing waves, redolent of hot, entranced noondays and cricket-serenaded moon-rises. Indian chanteuse Susheela Raman, Trans-Global Underground sitarist Sheema Mukherjee, Tunisian singer Dhafer Youssef, electric violinist Hugh Marsh, and Turkish rapper Ceza merge and separate, but this is business-as-usual in a place that has stood at the crossroads of Europe and Asia since time out of mind.--Christina Roden