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I think it took maybe 20 seconds between my friend Kara putting the Finders Keepers reissue of Selda‘s 1976 self-titled album on the stereo the other night and everyone in the room scrambling for the liner notes to figure out what the hell we were listening to. Selda’s described as an Anatolian folk singer, and I guess I can hear some of that in there — although most of my exposure to Turkish music has been while watching schlocky Turkish action movies, so I’m not exactly an expert — but this record is far from traditional. Unless of course insanely trippy analog synths are a traditional part of Anatolian folk that I don’t know about. Selda is a serious skull fuck, produced with a flagrant disregard for any preconceived ideas about what constitutes “too much flange.” I want to call the end result something like a Bollywood sound track recorded by Black Sabbath, but that’s still not freaky enough.
