Turkish Studies Vol. 11, No.

2, 251268, June 2010

Homegrown Sounds of Istanbul: World Music, Place, and Authenticity

I RMENCI KORAY DEG
D I [ O ]T G B R E [ V E KorayDegirmenci 0 2 11 koray@erciyes.edu.tr 000002010 Turkish 10.1080/14683849.2010.483866 FTUR_A_483866.sgm 1468-3849 Original Taylor 2010 and & Studies Article Francis (print)/1743-9663 Francis (online) D I [ O ]T

Department of Sociology, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey

ABSTRACT This study broadly examines the relationship between world music and the production of place and locality in the cultural economy of late capitalism by looking at the Turkish case, focusing specifically on how Doublemoon, an internationally well-known Istanbul-based label, constructs an Istanbul sound under the label of world music or world fusion. It investigates how the image of Istanbul produced through the category of world music is a reproduction of the stereotypical identity of the citythe meeting place of ethnicized and essentialized East and West. The investigation shows how global discourses of world music are incorporated and indigenized in the production of Turkish world music as created by Doublemoon.

Introduction: The Rise of World Music in Istanbul Music markets throw sounds into the air, blending them all so as to render them indistinguishable from one another. A clarinet taksim (improvisation) gives way to a piece that begins with a womans voice heavily processed with a synthesizer and accompanied by a ney1 improvisation. This is followed by the rapping of the famous Turkish hip-hop artist, Ceza, in which Sufi philosophy is praised. An oyun havas (dance tune) particular to Roma (gypsy) weddings in Turkey gradually stiklal Avenue, located in the Pera (Beyog surpasses these sounds along I lu) district of Istanbul, where important symbols of the city such as Galatasaray Square, iek Pasaj (Flower Passage), Balk Pazar (the fish market), Tnel (the tunnel), and several churches, synagogues, and academic institutions are found. As late as 2000 it was still rather unusual to hear such voices there; the inhabitants of the avenue used to listen to popular (Western) classical music pieces, French chansons, or Hollywood soundtracks. Undoubtedly, the avenue, starting from around Galata Tower and leading up to Taksim Square, has a cosmopolitan outlook, attracting about 3 million people on weekends. Just three kilometers stiklal Avenue has three Starbucks cafes that are always full, even on weeklong, I days and off-hours. One afternoon, for example, a Starbucks served Turkish coffee in traditional Turkish coffee cups imprinted with the Starbucks logo while
]D I [ O T G B R [ E V E ] D I [ ] O T

irmenci, Erciyes University, Department of Sociology, 38209, Correspondence Address: Koray Deg Kayseri, Turkey. Email: koray@erciyes.edu.tr.
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ISSN 1468-3849 Print/1743-9663 Online/10/020251-18 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14683849.2010.483866

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playing an Ibrahim Ferrer CD, followed by several Latin American pieces. The posters on the walls were reminiscent of the album covers of the famous world music label Putumayo. Gradually, since 2000, there has been a revival or rediscovery of traditional and local musical cultures in Turkey that has been relegated to the commercial category of world music. Such a rediscovery and its implications for the Turkish music industry are conspicuous in Istanbul, the center of Turkeys music industry. The incorporation of supposedly local and traditional musical forms, such as Roma (gypsy), Sufi, or Turkish folk music, into the world music category is a very recent phenomenon in Turkey. However, this is not to say there were no previous attempts at reviving those musical forms. Indeed, they date back to the early 1970s but within the categories of ethnic jazz (etnocaz) or free jazz. Those attempts were generally the result of works by the expatriated musicians (such as Muvaffak Falay, alias Maffy; Okay Temiz; and Burhan al), Western musicians abroad who were highly interested in Turkish musical forms (such as Don Cherry), and some particular producers. The motivation behind those works largely reflected the general craze among Western musicians in the 1960s and 1970s to head towards the East. Those works were mainly the outcome of these musicians personal quests for alternative ways of making music. The end result of those attempts included performances within festivals, albums published in relatively small numbers, and projects with seriously limited financial and organizational inputs. Thus, those works were not promoted a great deal by the music market; they usually remained marginal, having gained a very limited niche market, if any. This situation has persisted in the later period as well. Sonia T. Seeman is correct in asserting that in the 1990s, jazz terminology predominated among Turkish jazz, rock and Roman world music practitioners. What jazz means and what is possible under jazz, then, has been interpreted from a locallygrounded cosmopolitan tradition. 2 Seeman continues by explaining that a conflict emerged from such a locallygrounded understanding of jazz; some Turkish practitioners of etnocaz generated a dichotomy between the Westernness intrinsic to jazz and Turkish identity. However, this locally-grounded cosmopolitan tradition was still confined within the conceptual boundaries that were defined by the very term of jazz itself. Thus, jazz can be seen as having an intermediary function in the redefinition and relocation of those local and traditional musical forms within the world music category (that means they are firstly jazz or etnocaz and then world music). This is a symptom of the long-standing East-West dichotomy that is mostly embodied in the polyphonymonophony discussions in Turkish music.3 What makes the transformation within the last decade distinct from the earlier period is that there is no longer any need to define the emerging forms within the general classification of jazz in order to incorporate them into the category of world music. Okay Temiz, the most prominent jazz percussionist in Turkey and among the first to engage in experimenting with ethnic or folk jazz, illustrates how world music as defined in the 2000s differs from world music as ethnic music in the 1970s:

Homegrown Sounds of Istanbul 253 A musician should have a multicultural attitude. S/he should combine various different traditions of music in the stage we used to use the term world music for such musics in the early 1970s one day I heard a world music talk. Where? In England. They have brought Nusrat Fateh who performs sacred music from Pakistan and similar others performing such kinds of music. These are musicians from different cultures; but they dont know anything about other cultures different from their own these are fanatic musicians going on their own ways.4 For Temiz, the category of world music is obviously closely associated with cosmopolitanism and is defined within the boundaries of jazz. Furthermore, in this discursive schema, performing any traditional or folk music alone without incorporating it in synthesis or fusion works (within Western musical structures) is not worth attention; it is falsely called world music. Indeed, such a perspective is still common among jazz musicians, and it largely implies that jazz is the most proper genre in which to experiment with other musical forms. This jazz perspective repudiates the category of world music as a totally commercial and degenerated phenomenon; it refuses to discuss the category in terms of aesthetics. It is safe to assert that what is called world music cannot be conceptualized within the (once) general category of jazz. This fact is true as much for the global music industry as for the music industry in Turkey. What has happened, especially during the last decade, is the complete annihilation of such a perspective of ethnic jazz in favor of the growing popularity of world music in the Turkish music industry. Much more than being an independent category of its own, in Istanbul world music has increasingly become an umbrella term for not only the musical projects broadly defined as fusion or synthesis by musicians and the market but also for local and traditional music. Moreover, the category is almost a black hole into which even the most traditional or local musical forms have imploded. For example, a successful Roma musician increasingly prefers to call himself a world musician, being well aware of the markets rewarding response to such a label. Before 2000, he would only perform at taverns, weddings, or other special events in the community, but now he is a world musician in demand at Istanbuls most popular music halls, such as Babylon.5 The City as Place and World Music The fact that world music as a commercial category has gained popularity in Istanbul is closely related to transformations taking place in the city. Istanbul has not been merely the place where multifarious musical traditions have combined historically; it also constitutes a space where some particular processes of globalization can be clearly observed. That said, Istanbul has been the subject of intensive discussions regarding its status as a global city. Using the definition of global cities as the controlling centers of capital and productive forces,6 various studies have labeled Istanbul as on the verge of becoming a global city.7 Istanbul has witnessed

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tremendous growth in segments such as entertainment, international media, foreign investment, and communication technology. New service sectors have emerged, and transnational corporations have an increased presence in the city, making it a cultural and economic center not only for Turkey but also for the rest of the world. A comprehensive account of discussions about the global city is not within the scope of this paper. However, the world music phenomenon should be seen as part of the process of the cultural (re)construction of the city, which indeed is a component of a more comprehensive global mechanism. Many of the complicated ways in which the global economy channels cultural forms in the spaces of economic practice take place mainly in urban landscapes. Cities have assumed significant roles in the global economy as nodes where the headquarters of transnational companies reside and from which capital flows.8 Moreover, cities have come to represent the unique and traditional culture of particular localities; in a globalizing world, culture-related activities have become significant sources of competition in global markets. Cities have become global brands, and culture has been considered the main mediator of processes of urban redevelopment and revitalization. The revival of culture has emerged as a central consideration at each stage of the restructuration of the urban space. This includes the rediscovery and renovation of historic sites, marketing the authenticity and uniqueness of local arts and crafts as being redefined in opposition to standardized goods in an age of mass production (promoting and selling local artisanship as a genuine form of artistic practice), and the so-called ethnic food industry (relabeled regional food for local tourists). These are embodiments of the larger process called urban renaissance as discussed in the literature of contemporary urban space, in which mobilizing urban cultural resources for economic revitalization and making money out of culture, consumption and spectacle are central elements.9 Thus, the city emerges as a center of economic activities in the global system and culture emerges as the business of cities.10 Furthermore, these processes are closely related to the deterritorializing effects of globalization, which, in this context, refer to the loss of the natural relation of culture to geographical and social territories.11 One might see culture and place as companions in this context, the boundaries of which are defined in relation to each other. Thus, while culture is detached from the place that offers the very possibility of its existence and definition, the place can no longer be defined in terms of that particular (mostly constructed) culture. Moreover, places are no longer the clear supports of our identity.12 Indeed, as Doreen Massey aptly observes, such an association between places and homogeneous culture or community represents an idealized notion of an era.13 The so-called organic relationship between place and culture, which globalization was supposed to have eradicated, has been reestablished discursively within urban spaces through the revival of culture. The redefinition or rediscovery of the place within urban space, or, in other words, the reconstruction of place-myth, is truly related to the so-called localization process in which cultural authenticity is constructed, reproduced, or maintained through a variety of practices.14

Homegrown Sounds of Istanbul 255 Therefore, in this process places are constructed in such a way as to constitute the very locality of a particular city. Locality might refer to the imagined localities within any particular territory, or a notion of locality that is the direct result of the place-making processes of globalization.15 Place, in this context, refers to an intimate and affective locality whose pleasures have now become unified with the structuring force of global space in contemporary cities.16 This means global forces demand cultural products and practices to be embedded with the symbolic content purportedly once belonging to the place. Thus, what is emerging is the relationship between localities generally shaped by globalization and the very locality (mostly constructed and fictional but meaningful nevertheless) that has been called imaginary in this context.17 To apply this idea to a music context, Martin Stokes idea that the contemporary musical experience exists within the contestation between the globalizing media cultures and creative positioning as a response to globalization processes is utilized.18 It broadly means that there is a contestation between localities (or rather, discourses of locality) that are products of globalization processes and the real or very localities of music as conceived within imaginary communities. Moreover, the world music phenomenon is a global cultural form paradoxically claiming to represent the very locality and the place itself. World music is a medium through which discourses of the global and local are produced and disseminated, and the term itself relies on its being perceived as both global and distant, with connections to specific places.19 Thus, it is not accidental that the major reference in liner notes and on album covers of most world music albums is to geographical places and to some spatial contexts in general. Distant (and thus exotic) places and their various mysterious traditions are portrayed on album covers and in liner notes, addressed mostly to Western audiences.20 Exoticness goes hand in hand with authenticity as well. If one of the aims of world music discourse is to make audiences feel they are traveling to the place from which the sounds originate, the other is to invoke the authenticity of those sounds by means of the places constructed. World music pieces are presented in a way to invoke the timeless, the ancient, the primal, the pure, the chthonic,21 and the notion of place plays a major role in such an association. Furthermore, the emergence of world music is associated with the entanglement of commerce and culture in the production of ethnicized commodities within a commodity culture in which ethnicized difference is both a matter of symbolic creativity and political economy.22 It is safe to assert that the discursive usage of place is the most convenient way to provoke the notion of ethnicity. Thus, the increasing currency of world music perfectly exemplifies the multiple ways in which places are constructed, commodified and contested.23 The term world music first emerged in academia in the mid 1950s as an alternative term for ethnomusicology to oppose the dominant tendency of music institutions and publics to assume the synonymy of music with Western European art music.24 When the music forms outside the Western classical tradition were considered as musics they had usually been categorized as being either Oriental (Asian art music), primitive (preliterate cultures) or folk (the internal primitives

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of Euro-America).25 However, this academic meaning of world music has gradually disappeared and been replaced with a commercial meaning of world music. In 1987, some independent record labels coined the term world music as a category for particular genres in the music industry.26 The music forms previously called ethnic, international, pop, folk, ethnopop, tribal, exotic, ambient, and the like have gradually been gathered together under the label world music, and the term has become an inclusive category that has gained currency in the music industry. This commercial meaning of the term has became further entrenched with two events: billboards began to publish top album charts in the world music category in 1990, and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) started giving Grammy Music Awards in the category of world music in 1991.27 The phenomenon of world music has attracted significant attention in the literature. As P. G. Toner and Stephen Wild state, the theoretical approaches to world music can be understood as the outcomes of two different but interrelated levels of analysis.28 While some approaches consider world music as part of an overarching global system and analyze it by focusing on the mechanisms of this system, others tend to focus on localities and attempt to understand the specifities of various contexts. Moreover, various approaches to world music can also be seen as celebratory or anxious narratives of the phenomenon.29 The earliest versions of the anxious narratives were mostly inspired by the cultural imperialism thesis; they have investigated how the non-Western and indigeneous music forms have become appropriated, packaged, and exploited in the name of world music and how this process exemplified a form of cultural imperialism.30 These perspectives have been criticized for the simplicity of the binaries of the cultural imperialism thesis, such as local/authentic versus global/commodified. Moreover, the cultural imperialism perspectives were blind to the complex interplays of intercultural cross-fertilizations and failed to grasp the complicated nature of the cultural appropriation processes.31 However, as Arjun Appadurai states, the global discourses, forms, and practices are indigenized in one way or another in the local, and this process of indigenization cannot be understood in terms of simple binaries, such as periphery or center or the local and the global.32 In this process, the elements supposedly belonging to the center/periphery or global/local are constantly contested, reshaped, and appropriated. Globalization creates points of encounter between the local and the global cultural forms, the nature of which can no longer be explicated by means of oneway determination models that are based on a presumed binary between the local and the global. Thus, the complicated nature of the transnational flows makes it increasingly harder to define such separate terrains and to give the determinative role solely to the abstract and fictional spaces of the global. The anxious narratives also include analyses that do not depend on simple binaries commonly observed in the versions of the cultural imperialism thesis. For example, Veit Erlmann draws from Fredric Jamesons account of the production of difference to directly relate the emergence of world music to the aesthetic production of difference, which is further dependent on two aspects of global culture:

Homegrown Sounds of Istanbul 257 commodity production and the way in which differentiation is written in to the very structural logic of late capitalism.33 Thus, commodity production involves both differentiation and homogenization that now comfortably reside as members of the same family.34 In contrast to this perspective, Mark Slobin sees no reason to believe in a hidden mechanism controlling the flow of culture in a global world.35 By giving more importance to the deterritorialization and redrawing of boundaries in a globalizing world, he investigates local projects in which the musicians and listeners formed micromusical scenes in global contexts. Similarly, Jocelyne Guilbault focuses on the emergence of new possibilities created by the world music phenomenon by looking at the configurations within which these music forms gain new meanings.36 She prefers to focus on the configurations rather than the structure; the latter is supposedly based on definite and stable relations of correspondence. Rather than giving an account of the world music phenomenon in terms of generalizing narratives, looking at specific patterns of articulation between the local and the global in particular local contexts is more fruitful. This, in a way, means what Feld describes as a shift from world music as a discourse to world music as a contact zone of activities and representations.37 Investigating the incorporation or indigenization of global discourses of world music in the local is a challenging task that requires both understanding the power of global discourses in the local and the specific features and particular conditions of the local. Mitchell competently points out that the production of global music forms in the local both manifests local specificity and character but at the same time inevitably takes place in the global market.38 The investigation of the local responses, first of all, entails the recognition that the present global system is the most ramified, all-encompassing environment ever in the history of artistic production, independent of the continued creativity of individual artists.39 Erlmann continues by explaining that the investigation of the local with respect to these dynamics requires a new understanding whereby ethnographic studies should think in terms of the global musical production that generates border-zone relations that allow performers to constantly evaluate their position within the system rather than in terms of simple binaries like the West and the Rest.40 The case of world music perfectly exemplifies the perplexing ways in which the localities and places are discursively reconstructed and rediscovered; it also shows how the global system increasingly depends on the commodification and fetishization of the locality. Moreover, the category of world music also implies multifarious discursive topographies in which actors position themselves and their music between various poles, such as traditional/modern, authentic/fusion (modern), local/ global, etc. Thus it is both a marketing term that operates through the commodification and reconstruction of ethnicity, spirituality, and the traditions and a cultural space where the discursive construction of place and locality creates new resources for music-making and music production on behalf of the musicians, producers, and recording labels. Therefore, the category implies the rediscovery of place, locality, and tradition through the lens of the globala discursive space existing on the

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fictional continuum from the local to the global. The term world music operates through the marketing discourses of genuine, spiritual, exotic, authentic, and pristine; it constantly redefines the space in terms of these attributes that supposedly create the sounds.41 Doublemoons case illustrates how particular world music discourses define Istanbul and how historical and geographical features of the city are used to constitute such discourses. It also shows how marketing discourses of world music are formed through the rediscovery or reconstruction of the various identities of the city. Selling Istanbul42: Doublemoon and Constructing the Sounds of the City The role of Doublemoon in the emergence and increasing popularity of world music in Turkey cannot be exaggerated. Doublemoon was founded in 1998 as a subsidiary of Pozitif Music Productions in order to release recordings of jazz performances at Babylon. However, it became a record label dedicated to releasing world music albums. Such a transformation reflects the evolution of Pozitif from a producer of jazz to a producer of world music. On its website, the company states: Pozitif has established local and international projects and partnerships, continuing to start up new ventures connecting East to West, the familiar to the new and unexpected. With music as both its journey and destination, Pozitif has managed to create its own dedicated audience who is always eager to cross boundaries.43 This mission statement echoes the typical discourse used in world music marketing. In addition to buzzwords such as East, West, boundary, and crossing, the statement evokes the idea of travel, a common theme in world music marketing. The most embodied form of this discourse can be found at Doublemoon. The label has been more than able to capture the interest of international audiences; indeed it has succeeded in becoming one of the most prominent independent world music labels in the world. Doublemoon was given the Top Label award by the World Music Expo (WOMEX) and was ranked eighth among the 20 top labels in the world in 2007. The label has agreements with the most prominent international labels and distributors in the global music industry, such as Atlantic Records, BMG Germany, and Musidisc. It is the first Turkish record label, and its catalog has appeared in digital music stores such as Apples iTunes and Napster. The firm owes this international esteem to its successful attempts at (re)inventing the sounds of Istanbul and to promoting the city as a brand. The ways the record label defines itself and its mission on its website is striking: stanbul, Doublemoon Records is an independent pioneering label based in I Turkey dedicated to spreading the cultural tapestry that is the citys sound around the world. Doublemoon has made a name for itself that is synonymous with world fusion where global souls bring together jazz & world, acoustic &
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Homegrown Sounds of Istanbul 259 electronic, and occidental & oriental music Doublemoons artists spread the stanbul around the world [authors emphasis].44 sound of I
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The construction of the sounds of Istanbul is a steady project for Doublemoon that can be observed throughout its releases. The East 2 West series perfectly exemplifies the textual and visual ways in which Istanbul as a place is embedded in the labels releases. In the liner notes of the series first album, Global Departures from Istanbul (2003), Doublemoon announces the aim of these compilations: East 2 West is a compilation that brings together the tracks from the Doublemoon catalogue offering some of the most daring and bold statements stanbul A brand new sound has been our vision from the beginout of I ning; from sufi-electronica to groove alla turca, from jazz to gypsy funk from oriental hip-hop to Anatolian blues.45
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The series continued with Ethno-Electronic Tales from Istanbul (2003), which defines its purpose as revealing beautiful sonic rainbows of the crossroads of civilizations, while Istanbul Strait Up (2005) aims to remove from the map the whole borderline of the probable realm between the East and the West. Finally, Crossing Continents (2006) represents where the enchantingly strange and eerily familiar sounds of Istanbul are sent out into the Universe. The album covers of the series are designed accordingly. Apart from the cover of Crossing Continents, which depicts different panoramas and important symbols of the city, Istanbul Strait Up constitutes an interesting example in the way it invokes the authenticity of the place. The cover shows images of the fish market, an important symbol of the city (see Figure 1). The various images of the same place are combined with images representing a so-called typical Turkish dinner table at which people drink rak (the unofficial national alcoholic beverage). The cover invokes an association between fish and rak, which indeed means to say rak goes best with fish, a cultural saying. The inside of the album also depicts a glass of rak, not immediately recognizable, which strengthens this theme. The design of the images exaggeratedly invokes cultural authenticity, in contrast to the overt inauthenticity of the tracks on the album, which range from what Doublemoon calls sufi-electronica to gypsy funk, from hip-hop to oriental dub. Other album covers in the series establish various relationships between the repertoire and the places represented on the covers. For example, the album cover of Global Departures from Istanbul combines visual details of ferries (similar to the cover of Istanbul Strait Up), which are also significant symbols of the city (see Figure 2). Despite the nostalgia and authenticity that such imagery evokes, the repertoire again is inauthentic, ranging from sufi-electronica to oriental hip-hop (the enlendiricis performance of an authenexception is the Lao Tayfa and Hsn S tic piece of Roma music). What is invoked is a part of the cultural history of the city.
D I [ ] O T Figure 1. The front cover of East 2 WestIstanbul Strait Up by various artists (Doublemoon, 2005). Figure 2. The front cover of the album East 2 West: Global Departures from Istanbul (Doublemoon, 2007). S C [ E D L ] I

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Figure 1. The front cover of East 2 WestIstanbul Strait Up by various artists (Doublemoon, 2005).

The visual representation of Istanbul on the releases was in a way designed to complement the emotions evoked by music. Moreover, almost all the artists of Doublemoon are defined in relation to Istanbul in one way or another. In the case of Baba Zula, for example, the website states that the groups album, Kkler (literally Roots, 2007), is full of fun, excitement, vigor, eccentricities, oddities stanbul, Baba Zulas hometown. The album Wonderand traditionjust like I lhan Ers land (2002) is described as the reflection and expression of I ahins ties to Istanbul. Moreover, some artists have produced new collaborations, the names of which directly connote Istanbul. An example is the Taksim Trio, formed in 2007. The Doublemoon website describes them as making music inspired by the heart of Istanbul. The term taksim means improvisation and is also the name of Istanbuls most famous neighborhood. It is also the heart of Istanbul in spatial terms, where Pera (Beyog lu) and many other important symbols of the city are located. What the company defines as world fusion takes its most interesting form in the album Istanbul (2003) by Craig Harris and the Nation of Imagination. The album consists of tracks that can hardly be called hybrids but rather eclectic juxtapositions of traditional Turkish music themes with jazz motifs, or as the liner notes assert, gypsy music, soul, rap, reggae, hard rock, folk music, you name it.
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Figure 2. The front cover of the album East 2 West: Global Departures from Istanbul (Doublemoon, 2007).

The embedding of the imagery of Istanbul in and on music albums takes an extreme form in the compilation Istanbul Twilight (2007). This is an audio-visual project consisting of music, videos and photographs from a big, crazy, sleepless city, as stated on the album cover. The vagueness of Istanbul constitutes the main theme, as the title infers, and it also perfectly exemplifies the personification of Istanbul, another pattern of the affective construction of Istanbul as a place. In the notes to the photograph album, such personification of Istanbul is evident: The story of an unpredictable city Safe and risky, Joyful and sad A friend? An enemy? You love it, you hate it Sometimes dark, sometimes light. Never innocent And yetunidentified. Does she really care? This is Istanbul Twilight. The photographs depict the people of Istanbul: the homeless, soldiers, rockers, crowds, lovers, a man in a hamam (bath house), and so on. The repertoire strengthens the idea of vagueness with the metaphor of twilightthe pieces are almost impossible to categorize without using Doublemoons preferred term, world fusion. The video, Istanbul, praises the city, portraying it as undergoing a

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transformation. The soundtrack is a sufi-electronica piece, Engewal, by Mercan Dede. Despite the inauthenticity of the Doublemoon repertoire, particular cultural or religious Turkish traditions are repeatedly depicted in visual or textual materials in direct relationship to the city, which invokes cultural authenticity. However, this cultural authenticity that primarily is seen through city images occurs in ambivalent ways. A perfect example is Mercan Dedes album 800 (2007), dedicated to Mevlana Rumi in celebration of his 800th birthday. Mercan Dede relates the main theme of flying in the visual narrative of the album (see Figure 3) with the Sufi philosophy. His statements emphasize the ambivalent character of the creatures in their relation to Istanbul: Flying means rising above the reality of this material world The flying creatures in the pictures of the album cover only look like the whirling dervishes. However, some of them have skirts different from the whirling dervishes in respect to their colors. They are above Istanbul; it is not certain whether they are landing or rising to the sky. One is faceless; a faceless whirling dervish! Another is more traditional.46 Whirling dervishes have always been the most well-known images of Sufism in the West.47 The ambivalence of Istanbul contributes to the ambivalence of the whirling dervishes. The discursive structure here actually constructs a similar Mevlevi image as to the ambivalence of the genre of sufi-electronica. In contrast to the philosophical connotations of the tracks in general, the track entitled Istanbul exhibits the most overt form of commodification of the city. It is a rearrangement of a famous traditional Istanbul song, skdara Giderken (translated as While Going to skdar, a famous historical district), with an electronic background. The final lyrics almost resemble the jargon of tourism in the ways it describes the city: Istanbul incredibly romantic there is everything here, there is beautiful arts and culture and music, and beautiful markets and beautiful food and lots of energy. The piece perfectly exemplifies the ways in which the city is commodified within a setting of religious and spatial authenticity. The theme of the Bosporus Bridge is worth specific attention since it is the most common metaphor for expressing the idea of bridging East and West, crossing continents, and hybridity or fusion in general terms. Apart from the album covers and liner notes using the bridge to evoke those notions and an album entitled Bosporus Bridge by Orientation (2001), musicians use the symbol discursively to locate themselves in respect to their aesthetic positions. As a remarkable example, enlendirici, one of the most popular Doublemoons Roman clarinet virtuoso Hsn S musicians in Turkey, states that:
Figure 3. The front and back cover of 800 by Mercan Dede (Doublemoon, 2007). S C [ E D L ] I

Nobody could force you to play in this or that way if you define yourself as performing world music. I mean you are free to do something with different

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Figure 3. The front and back cover of 800 by Mercan Dede (Doublemoon, 2007).

instruments and arrangements. I am neither a Westerner nor an Easterner, but in-between. I mean this Bridge does not exist in vain here, joining Asia and Europe. So, we are very lucky to be here in Istanbul as musicians.48

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The in-betweenness or liminality (and indeed the very materiality) that the bridge invokes is a recurring theme in both visual and textual materials. Fatih Akns award-winning film Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) constitutes an interesting example of how Istanbul with its geographical features is used in order to create a conception of the sound of Istanbul. Doublemoon (and thus Pozitif) contributed a great deal to the project by serving as music advisor, and with the founders of Pozitif and their musicians, taking major roles in the documentary. The soundtrack of the film was also released by Doublemoon in Turkey (2005). The film journeys through the soundscape of Istanbul through the eyes of Einstrzende Neubauten bassist Alexander Hacke, who comes to Istanbul to capture the sounds of the city. He states that for him the city itself is a mystery and that he hopes to unfold Istanbuls secrets by capturing its sounds. The film continues with sequences showing the protagonist listening to the everyday sounds of Istanbul: calls to prayer, car horns, the hum of the crowds on the streets, car alarms, the voices of the street vendors coming in through the windows of the Grand Hotel de Londres where he stays (another important symbol of the city). Those everyday sounds merge with the music (of Doublemoon artists in many cases) in the film and are accompanied by sequences showing Istanbul street scenes and helicopter shots focusing on the bridge to invoke the feeling of liminality. The first group, Baba Zula, performs oriental dub in a boat journeying across the Bosporus Strait, which again conjures up the notion of in-betweenness in both musical and spatial terms. The voices coming from the meyhanes (taverns), the fish market, and from people sitting on their balconies are followed by images and sometimes sounds from the streets, regional restaurants, people dancing in clubs, transvestites on the streets, and homeless people. The protagonist discovers Pera (Beyog lu) in particular: the dark backstreets and the people there, clubs, discos, and underground bars. The musicians often interrupt their musical performance by explaining different aspects of the city, the bridge, and also the Western and Eastern elements in their music by giving some technical information. The founders of Pozitif appear at the very start of the film and reappear again several times in order to explain this is Istanbuls inbetweenness in both spatial and musical terms. The notion of transgressing and decomposing the geographical and cultural boundaries specific to Fatih Akns films, previously thematized in the film Head-On (2004), is also a recurring theme in the film. The film thus goes beyond the simple idea of the meeting of West and East symbolized by the bridge. It aims at invoking a complicated and an ambivalent notion of the sound of Istanbul, which is seen as a product of the very nature of globalization and post-modernity.
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Conclusion What is defined as the sound of Istanbul by Doublemoon is actually more than the outcome of diverse musical traditions, such as Roma, Kurdish, Sufi, Balkan, and Greek music, pulled out from various localities. The sound of Istanbul is rather what the record label prefers to call world fusion. The construction of the

Homegrown Sounds of Istanbul 265 sound of Istanbul primarily involves a notion of locality that makes Istanbul a place spreading its own sounds to the world. Furthermore, the concept of fusion here does not entail the intermingling of West and East in musical terms, although the duality surrounds almost every textual and visual material produced by the company. Rather, the notion of fusion here refers to the idea of playing with the roots or revitalizing the sources on a ground that primarily implies amalgamation or hybridity, which does not necessarily mean the combination of Western and Eastern music forms. Various other formulations of hybridity exist within the repertoire of Doublemoon that do not necessitate the inclusion of Western music. Such a localization of music standing for the musical imagery of Istanbul (rather making the sounds citys own) and constructed mostly by reference to particular geographies of the city does not operate through the notion of authenticity in musical terms. Doublemoon manufactures an Istanbul sound that supposedly symbolizes the city. Doublemoons world music is already hybrid; its hybridity identifies it as world music that is particularly of Istanbul. One might safely argue that what was defined as inauthentic in Doublemoons case can also be defined as authentic. The cosmopolitan fusion sound is billed as authentic to Istanbulin that Istanbul is authentically a place of fusion, hybridity, and bridging. While cover images capitalize on authentic and immediately recognizable scenes from Istanbul, the liner notes as well as the music underscore stylistic fusion, reproducing Istanbuls stereotypical portrayal as the meeting place or the bridge between East and West. This world fusion corresponds to the ambivalent position Istanbul occupiesthis citys spatial and cultural in-betweenness. The Istanbul that is produced by this music seems to be a cosmopolitan Istanbul, the meeting place of East and West as the clich goes.49 Moreover, Doublemoons world music is somewhat different from that in the US and Western Europe in the sense that it is much more about fusion than authenticitythrough the process of this fusion local and traditional sounds are reinvented and made palatable to a wider urban middle class audience. In a similar manner, Fatih Akns film, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (in which Doublemoons artists played major roles) also creates an image of Istanbul as an in-between and cosmopolitan city. This cosmopolitanism and in-betweenness mostly depend on essentialized and ethnicized notions of East and West. Being neither familiar nor strange, Istanbul stands for in-betweenness in the discourses of world music, where even cultural and spatial authenticity is constructed in ambivalent terms, the consequence of the logic of fusion or amalgamation that forms the core of musical inauthenticity. The imagery of cultural and spatial symbols of Istanbul, accompanied by discovery of the sound of Istanbul, work to promote the city as a brand. The city, in such a discourse, becomes an entity in itself, operating almost independently from the geographical space it occupies in cultural and economic terms. Doublemoon perfectly exemplifies the perplexed ways in which Istanbul is constructed and commodified as a place through and within the contestation and combination of musical inauthenticity with an ambivalent authenticity of culture and geography.

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1. An ancient, end-blown flute that is commonly used in Middle Eastern music. 2. Sonia T. Seeman, You are Roman!: Music and Identity in Turkish Roman Communities, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Ethnomusicology, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, 2002, p. 326. 3. That discussion can hardly be understood without looking at the attempts in the founding years of the Turkish Republic (19231940s) to modernize (Westernize) Turkish folk music and to characterize Ottoman classical music as a backward form that was considered as not complying with the civilization that Turkish people deserve. For further information see Blent Aksoy, Cumhuriyet Dnemi Musikisinde Farkllas ma Olgusu, [The Phenomenon of Differentiation in Music of the Ottoman Era] in Gnl Paac (ed.), Cumhuriyetin Sesleri [The Sounds of the Republic] (Istanbul: Trkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakf Yaynlar, 1999), pp. 3035; Blent Aksoy, Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete Musiki ve Batllas ma, [Music and Westernization from Tanzimat to the Republic] in Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete Trkiye Ansiklopedisi [Turkish Encyclopedia from Tanizmat to the letis irmenci, On the Pursuit of Republic] (Istanbul: I im Yaynlar, 1986), pp. 12121236; Koray Deg a Nation: The Construction of Folk and Folk Music in the Founding Decades of the Turkish Republic, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2006), pp. 4765; lu, Modernizing Reforms and Turkish Music in the 1930s, Turkish Studies, and Orhan Tekeliog , Vol. 2, No. 1 (2001), pp. 93109. For a recent history of Turkish popular music see Feza Tansug Turkish Popular Music: The Political Economy of Change, The University of Maryland, Department of Music, unpublished PhD Dissertation, 1999 and Martin Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 4. Personal interview with the author, Istanbul, December 3, 2007. 5. Babylon was founded by Pozitif Music Production, which also owns the Doublemoon record label. It was twice voted among the best 100 jazz clubs of the world (2002 and 2004) by the music magazine Down Beat. 6. John Friedmann, The World City Hypothesis, Development and Change, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1986), pp. 6983; Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). lar Keyder, The Setting, in ag lar Keyder (ed.), Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local 7. ag lar Keyder and Ays (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 328; ag e nc, Istanbul and the Concept of World Cities (Istanbul: Freidrich Ebert Foundation, 1997). 8. Sassen, The Global City. 9. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cultural-economy and Cities, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2007), pp. 143161, p. 151. 10. Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), p. 1. 11. Garcia Canclini, Hybrid cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 229. 12. David Morley and Kevin Robins, Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 87. 13. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Kayseri: Polity Press, 1994). 14. Victor Roudometof, Glocalization, Space, and Modernity, The European Legacy, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2003), pp. 3760, p. 47. 15. In this conception, the author carefully avoids Anthony Smiths categorical distinction between the cultural formations of the nation-building process and the cultural constructions of globality. On the basis of this distinction he believes that global culture is essentially artificial, shapeless, ahistorical, and timeless. What is defined as global here is meaningful only in its ability to construct localities. See Anthony Smith, Towards a Global Culture, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1990), pp. 171191. Arjun Appadurais definition of the local is central in such a conception. For him, locality is not a fact but a project that has always had to be produced, maintained and nurtured deliberately. See Arjun Appadurai, Globalization and the Research Imagination, International Social Science Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1999), pp. 22938, p. 231.
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16. Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 54. 17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). lar 18. Martin Stokes, Sounding Out: The Culture Industries and the Globalization of Istanbul, in ag Keyder (ed.), Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 121142. 19. John Connel and Chris Gibson, World Music: Deterritorializing Place and Identity, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2004), pp. 34261, p. 344. 20. This point can be observed best by looking at compilations. To give an example from the Bar de Lune record label dedicated to releasing compilation albums such as Destination: Cape Town (2007), Destination: Tokyo (2007), Destination: Havana (2006), Destination: Istanbul (2006), and so on. Some of Putumayos releases, such as the Odyssey series, emphasize the theme of travel in the liner notes and through the pieces that were compiled in the series. For a detailed discussion on this issue see John Connel and Chris Gibson, Vicarious Journeys: Travels in Music, Tourism Geographies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2004), pp. 225. Moreover, some authors conceptualize world music by primarily using notions such as aural tourism [Tony Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1996)] or commercial aural travel-consumption [John Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and Culture Industry (London: Pluto Press, 2000)]. 21. Timothy Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 26. 22. Claire Dwyer and Philip Crang, Fashioning Ethnicities: The Commercial Spaces of Multiculture, Ethnicities, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2002), pp. 41030, p. 412. 23. Connell and Gibson, World Music: Deterritorializing Place and Identity, p. 342. 24. Steven Feld, A Sweet Lullaby for World Music, Public Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2000), pp. 145171, p. 147. 25. Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds, Micromusics of the West (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), p. 4. 26. Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity, p. 53. 27. Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. 28. P. G. Toner and Stephen A. Wild, Introduction-World Music: Politics, Production and Pedagogy, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2004), pp. 95112, p. 98. 29. Feld, A Sweet Lullaby for World Music. 30. For a good example, see Reebe Garofalo, Whose World, What Beat: The Transnational Music Industry, Identity and Cultural Imperialism, The World of Music, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1993), pp. 1632. 31. Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity, p. 51. 32. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 33. Veit Erlmann, Africa Civilized, Africa Uncivilized: Local Culture, World System and South African Music, Journal of South African Studies, Vol. 20, No. 7 (1994), pp. 165179, p. 166; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). See also Veit Erlmann, The Politics and Aesthetics of Transnational Musics, The World of Music, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1993), pp. 315. 34. Veit Erlmann, The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990s, Public Culture, Vol. 8 (1996), pp. 467487, p. 473. 35. Slobin, Subcultural Sounds, Micromusics of the West. 36. Jocelyne Guilbault, Interpreting World Music: A Challenge in Theory and Practice, Popular Music, Vol. 16 (1997), pp. 3144. 37. Feld, A Sweet Lullaby for World Music, p. 154. 38. Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity. 39. Veit Erlmann, Music Modernity and Global Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 473. 40. Ibid.
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41. Simon Frith and Timothy Taylor illustrate aptly how these marketing discourses replace each other in various contexts. For example, Frith shows how the authentic worked in retail terms as a redescription of the exotic. See Simon Frith, The Discourse of World Music, in Georgia Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds), Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 305322, p. 308; Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. lar Keyders very influential article which was 42. Here the term Selling Istanbul directly refers to ag part of the global city discussions in Turkey. The term implies the infrastructural and superstructural projects of the government to transform Istanbul into a commodity, thereby gaining the status of a stanbul, Vol. 3 stanbulu Nasl Satmal? [How to Sell Istanbul?] I lar Keyder, I global city. See ag (1992), pp. 8085. 43. http://www.pozitif.info/2004/en/pozitif/pozitif.asp. 44. http://www.pozitif.info/2004/en/pozitif/pozitif.asp. 45. Taken from the liner notes of the album, East 2 West: Global Departures from Istanbul/ Flight 001 (Doublemoon, 2003). 46. Personal interview with the author, Istanbul, December 28, 2007. 47. Feldman states that even in Ottoman times participating in the ayin (ceremony) of the whirling dervishes (a buzzword that is still used to depict Mevlevis) and visiting the Mevlevi cloisters (mevlevihane) in Istanbul were musts for tourists. See Walter Feldman, Music in Performance: Who are the Whirling Dervishes? in Virginia Danielson (ed.), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: The Middle East, Vol. 6 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 107111. 48. Personal interview with the author, Istanbul, December 26, 2007. 49. Amy Mills describes how Istanbul has historically been defined in terms of cosmopolitanism and how cosmopolitanism has always been an inseparable part of the citys identity. She also shows the contemporary efforts to reconstruct the cosmopolitan identity of the city. See Amy Mills, Narratives in City Landscapes: Cultural Identity in Istanbul, The Geographical Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (2005), pp. 441462; Amy Mills, The Place of Locality for Identity in the Nation: Minority Narratives of Cosmopolitan Istanbul, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 40 (2008), pp. 383401.
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