Album Title: Sultan Orhan
Performer: Burhan Öçal | Pete Namlook
Label and album #: DoubleMoon 0024
Play Time:
49'40"
Recorded: 2004


Sultan Orhan is an often heavy-metal descent into Turkish ambient electronica styled by famed multi percussionist Burhan Öçal and Pete Namlook. The former also plays all stringed instruments and what seems like vocal rap percussion but actually is a recounting of episodes and events from the Ottoman empire. The whole is a somewhat monochrome though powerfully atavistic exercise in dense and dark rhythm carpets spiked with guttural chants, interludes of infrasonic drones with metallic saz and tanbur solos, spoken voice reflecting in looped echoes off imaginary cave walls and the multi-layered tattoos of darbuka, kös, kudüm and bendi drums falling like relentless rusted rain
on a futuristic Matrix-style underground rave, time-warp space ships hovering above.


Sultan Orhan is very much a sound track without the major motion picture, a neo-shamanic affair intended to set up and hold a somewhat hallucinatory space that will create its own inner movie. It's pulsating and suggestive. The hippie term trippy probably describes it best. Label mate Mercan Dede works in a quite similar vein but Burhan Öçal's Sultan Orhan is far darker than anything on Nefes or Su. It's more primal, more primitive, like descending into an underworld ruled by a manic percussionist creating spiraling universes with the energy of beats, clangs and metallic shards...