The Turkish Psychedelic Explosion

Book excerpt: The long forgotten story of Turkish psychedelic music in the twentieth century, told in relation to the social, political and cultural climate of the time. In the mid-1960s, a new generation of young Turkish musicians combined Western pop music with traditional Anatolian folk to forge the home-grown phenomenon of Anadolu Pop. But that was just the beginning. Through the second half of that turbulent decade, Turkish rock warped and transformed, striking out into wilder and stranger territory – fuelled by the psychedelic revolution and played out over a backdrop of cultural, social and political turmoil. The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion tells the story of a musical movement that was brought to an end by a right-wing coup in 1980, largely forgotten and only recently being rediscovered by Western crate-diggers. It’s a tale of larger-than-life musical pioneers with raging political passions and visionary ideas ripe for rediscovery.