INSANLAR / RICARDO VILLALOBOS – Kime Ne

Stunning new music from Istanbul!
A twenty-four-minute wig-out you can dance to — wild baglama improvisation and mystical male-unison singing, atop the propulsive mass of a Berlin half-stepper, with turbulent detours into dub, radiophonics and psychedelia.
‘Kime Ne’ means ‘so what’, ‘what’s it got to do with you’. The song adapts verses from the seventeenth-century poet Kul Nesimi, wistfully invoking the Melami strain of Sufism as a touchstone of humility and tolerance, in dark times. ‘Insanlar’ means ‘humankind’… ‘The Human Beings’.
RV’s mixes are expert, taut and hard-grooving. 2 is the more agitated and dubwise.
Nearly an hour of music, on three sides; the fourth is etched with Katharina Immekus’ lovely artwork.
Knockout stuff, honestly.