Godless Ceremony

Islandman supplies slick multi-layered atmospheric down-tempo electronica with an ethno touch. Featuring musicians from all over the globe, the title of the album Godless Ceremony gives one pause for thought.

A sense of ‘ceremony’ to be sure – is what is missing in most European and American music, and life in general. It is also in turn what a lot of listeners, concert-goers and clubbers crave, and at least partially accounts for the popularity of such phenomena as the Balkan wave. Here, however, Tolga Böyük aka Islandman, presents music of ceremony shorn of its sacral component. It is a bit like two ships passing in the night: Westerners move eastward, yearning for the sacred, while at the same time Easterners, like Böyük, abandon it.

Here we run up against ‘Kara Toprak’ again, the celebrated aşik Veysel folk composition, which Altin Gün recently covered on their last LP. ‘Tarhamanine Assinegh’ features Touareg band Tamikrest doing a call-and-response routine pitched against some vintage electronica, and finally three-fourths of the way through, the famous desert blues guitar work kicks in. ‘Aku Membawa’ is a good one too – a house track stuck in an echo chamber with the title phrase (I Bring) chanted in Indonesian, and the reverb turned all the way up.