Category: Music

HP Culture
Rapper Ezhel is Spotify’s most streamed Turkish artist of 2020

This week, music streaming service Spotify released its annual “Wrapped” statistics, providing data about the listening habits of 2020 for individual users, countries, and the platform as a whole. In Turkey, rap, pop and indie music were the most popular genres for streaming in 2020, with Ezhel topping the charts as the most listened to […]

Music
UK Turkish R&B singer Eyeden releases new track Cyprus on My Mind

British Turkish Cypriot artist Eyeden has delved into his ethnic roots for his latest release, a bi-lingual English-Turkish track called Cyprus on My Mind, that dropped this weekend. The singer and rapper from Coventry gave T-VINE a sneak preview of the video, which adds striking visuals to the lyrically powerful song that’s dedicated to Cyprus’ recent tragic history. We […]

HP Culture
Anatolian Pop torch bearer Taner Öngür is back with new album Water Cycle

Taner Öngür has been the torch-bearer for Turkish pop rock for decades, even baptising the genre with the name ‘Anatolian Pop’. The bass guitarist cum multi-instrumentalist has played with many of Turkey’s seminal artists, including Barış Manço, Erkin Koray, Ersen Dinleten and Selda Bağcan, and featured in the line-ups of leading progressive and psychedelic Anatolian […]

Books
The incredible tale of Frederick Bruce Thomas, aka ‘The Black Russian’, who brought Jazz and music hall culture to Turkey

Any visitor to Turkey will know how important music is to the local culture. From Turkish pop to Ottoman-inspired classical music (Türk Sanat Müziği), folk (Halk Müziği) and the blues (Türkü), live renditions can be seen and heard everywhere. One of the country’s biggest modern entertainment traditions has been the gazino – a high-end cabaret […]

Features
The Godfathers of Turkish Psychedelic Rock

Roots The effects of the French Revolution in 1789 reached the Ottoman Empire nearly fifty years later. Starting from 1839 until 1876, during the regression period of Ottoman Empire, a set of reforms were implemented to modernise, centralise and improve the legal, economic, social and political structure of the government, which was called the Tanzimat […]

HP News
Coronavirus: live music in crisis – help Save The Jazz Cafe

One of London’s most iconic live music venues has launched a crowdfunding appeal to try and survive the coronavirus pandemic. The Jazz Cafe has been an important platform for a diverse range of artists, including those of Turkish origin. Like other venues up and down the country, it was forced to shut its doors in […]

HP News
France’s Believe buys majority stake in Turkey’s biggest record label DMC

DMC, the record label behind Turkey’s biggest pop stars Tarkan, Sezen Aksu and Ajda Pekkan, is being taken over by French digital music platform Believe. An agreement worth $23.4 million, signed on 17 April by Doğan Holding, Doğan Müzik Yapım’s (DMC) parent company, and Believe, will see the French company take a 60% stake in […]