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Tickets
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Sufi / Ambient / World-Beat
Mercan Dede & Secret Tribe
| Turkey
Booking-Agent:
Frank Abraham
+49 30 261032920
fa@f-cat.de
GEO, 20.03.2008
Mercan Dede draws his inspiration from the great master Rumi, gets the basis of his music from poetical standing of dervishes. Because of the brilliant acoustic sounds, this album, invites us into the world of dervishes. It is a fabulous opus emerging not only from our ancestors but also futurist ideas.
www.worldmusiccentral.org , 24.02.2008
Mercan Dede’s 800 isn’t what was expected, that is to say what it’s not is the proposed fourth album in his elements tetralogy. He suspends this ongoing project to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the the birth of the Sufi teacher, poet and mystic, the Mevlana Rumi, the source of his central inspiration; the presentation of the album includes his letter to the Mevlana plus intensely personal sleeve notes and generous thanks to rival any Oscar acceptance speech.
This is quintessential Mercan Dede with no deviation from the consistent and mesmerizing quality of his defining sound and musical philosophy, continued proof that as a composer and producer he’s a skillful artist with an acute ear for perceptive and masterly positioning of the individual and collective strengths of his contributors. Again he unfailingly produces a heady, spiritual feast of musicians, singers and poets always underlined with his own driving input of electronica, percussion and ney. 800 has a atmospheric potency, an elegant and almost filmic quality in the sumptuous textures of its processional ambience. Combined with a welcome return to longer tracks, this is all to scalp tingling effect.
800 does, however, feel lighter and more playful in parts than previous albums with intriguing titles such as "Cotton Princess And Seven Midgets" vs "Ali Baba And The Forty Eskimos" and "Lullaby For A Sweet Chubby Mermaid," but as always with Mercan Dede it’s not easy to isolate individual tracks from the whole concept, and as always he gives well deserved prominence to his contributors. To name a mere four, Ceza (last heard on Su in 2004), makes a reappearance, deliciously rapping on tracks 800, "Captive" and "Istanbul," Shankar Das of Montreal-based Ragleela playing deft and racing tabla solo on "Mercanistan," the glitter of Ben Grosman’s hurdy gurdy saz and Ismail Tunçbilek’s baglama on the "Sun Rises In The East" and the dark echoing voice of the poet Hayrullah Ersoz reading his own words on "Where Are You?." And that said, if there is a failing, and really it’s a small one, it’s that of not publishing the lyrics and poetry in the sleeve notes.
The Seattle Times, 12.05.2005
Ambient electronic dance beats combined with Sufi music and whirling doesn't sound like a typical recipe for kid entertainment. Fortunately, kids aren't hampered by preconceptions of what should be fun. By the end of Mercan Dede and Secret Tribe's performance, hordes of kids had swarmed the stage, dancing maniacally to the multilayered percussion and dance tracks that Dede's band laid down. Dede looks like your typical DJ, standing guard behind a pair of turntables, but comparisons can stop there. He also plays the ney, a reed flute, and was flanked by a set of mostly teenage virtuosos on percussion, clarinet and trumpet and the kanun (Turkish zither). The sounds the ensemble produces range from spiritual and mesmerizing to all-out dance party free-for-all. Whirling dervish dancer Mira Burke began and ended the show, spinning in the Sufi style of spiritual dancing. In the final number, she wore an expansive white, double-layered skirt that spun out from her body in standing waves of hypnotic motion. The show is recommended for ages 7 and up, which seems about right, although my four-year-old daughter was so entranced by the dancing I had to pull her back from the stage. Doug Kim
Die Zeit, 23.02.2005
Mercan Dede is leading in the art of fusion. A "dede" is actually a "grandfather" - an older person of respect in a metaphorical sense - but none of this applies to this multimedia artist. When he's onstage, Arkin Ilicali, who calls himself Mercan Dede after the protagonist in a
novel, twirls his hair into little stingers, so that he looks like a spiritually interested punk. The audience of his shows finds him behind a huge, 4-c coloured altar of a DJ stand, where he turns some buttons, and plays a few notes on the traditional ney flute sometimes. "They are
all much better musicians than I am," he admits smiling, but their must be one person to keep the whole thing together. Thus, he's the master of ceremonies, there is much oriental together with a digital beat, from artfully labyrinthine songs of mourning to folk songs from the Balkan, which are performed by a 15-year old roma prodigy. When the dervish girl enters the stage at a decisive moment, the exultation knows no boundaries (or: doesn't end). The wirling dervishes of the sufi tradition are Mercan Dede's trump card in the game of East-West-synthesis: spiritual islam and techno - no one combined these before he did. He had the idea already as a child, when was in a basketball court in his hometown Bursa and saw, how the dancers were swirling according to an old custom. Sufism was oppressed then in the rigorously secular state, no wonder that the creatures appeared to him as if they were a mixture of angels and aliens. When he started reading in the writings of the poet Rumi, it was as if he opened a letter, which was sent 7 centuries ago. The message: it does not count where you are coming from or what education you had, but what you carry within your heart. "It's the idea of radical inclusion, which enthuses me in Sufism", he says, who lives in Montreal
and Istanbul in turns and is on tour for the rest of the year. Although the tradition - strictly speaking - says that a novice needs to spend 40 days in silence in a room, then performs introspection for 1001 days, before he enters the circle of the enlightened, no one has
that much time nowadays. In Mercan Dede's shows, everyone can get his share of transcendence he needs. The allegation that he is practising "sufism light", cannot upset him.
"What is bad about making things easy?". Dede is one of those modern nomads, who look back on their country while on the road, in order to be surprised during each show in his old home. Not only the music, but also schools, daily life, fashion, the question of human rights:
everything changes - in most cases for the better. Sometimes the Turkey of his youth cannot be recognized, he says, so much has moved, in the last five years more than in the thirty years before....
