Press

French label Long Distance has a nose for unusual quality and every now and then they discover it in our country too.(…) breathtakingly beautiful. (by ADB, De Standaard, about Macar, 26/06/06)

The effect is evocative rather than didactic, and an arrangement of WB Yeats’s Sally Gardens is by no means the most surprising element in this unusual andausterely beautiful album. MH (Arts. Telegraph, over Macar, 4/10/2006)

A Turkish voice, an Iraqi qanun (Arab lap harp) and a Belgian cello: that’s all it takes to make beautiful acoustic music. (De Standaard, by Benjamin Tollet, about Tri a Tolia, 15/12/08)

Melike weaves a spellbinding story of despair, hope and resilience (…) has the listener begging for more. (Mondomix, by Daniel Brown, about Macar August 2004)

The a cappella of Melike Tarhan is poignant and melancholic. (deMorgen, about Snow, 23/11/2016)

The mix is unique and that is both an advantage and a challenge: it is something new. An untrodden path (…). So we see how one person’s story can summarise the challenge of our contemporary diversity. And Mitridate, in its way, is also an example of that quest along an untrodden path.” (Kifkif, about Mitridate, 22/09/2016)

More than promising is the least you can say of the album. (…) Melike does not sing her work (…) in Dutch and you curse that on repeated listening, because you want to understand what she has to tell you on musical staves. (…) strong vocal performance. (Freek Neirynck, about Inn of Love)

All in all a very successful album (MUZZIKA! November 2014 – Babelmed, about, Inn of Love)

Melike is a rising star of Turkish song (Franceculture.com, about Macar, 4/10/2006)

This is a very special kind of folkopera with certain grandeur (…) A very succesful release. (Psyche van het Volk about Macar, 1/03/2006)

A quasi-symphonic programmatic tone poem with voice. (Sixmoon.com by Srajan Ebaen, 04/06/05)

With ‘Juicy Little Bramble’, Melike Tarhan meets new musical endings, without cutting her umbilical cord completely (…) solid pop arrangements (…) that help shape Tarhan’s current choice of singer-songwriter. But let’s stick to sometimes rather unconventional ethno-pop. (Folkmagazine, Bart Vanoutrive, on Tarhan – Juicy Little Bramble, 2015)

The result ‘Inn Of Love’ is a new jewel in the already rich crown. (Antoine Légat, Folkcorner Den Appel)


Arts. Telegraph

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Thanks to forced secularisation in the 1920s and relatively early industrialisation, Turkey has a well-established “folk” tradition in the Western sense, in which privileged urbanites look to rural sounds as a source of inspiration and “authenticity”. Real traditional music, meanwhile, thrives in peasant and nomad communities.

Epitomising the former tendency, cool-voiced chanteuse Melike Tarhan draws the sounds of the ashik – Anatolia’s traditional bards – into a web of sophisticated international influences, creating a parable on the current Iraq war which makes for surprisingly soothing, meditative listening.

The ashiks’ rounded, open and surprisingly European-sounding tones fit easily with Tarhan’s breathily confiding ambient-folk manner. Her Iraqi arranger-husband Osama Abdulrasol blends the metallic jangle of the saz lute and traditional fiddle with Western strings, touches of flamenco and Brazilian rhythm in a series of vignettes telling the story of a peasant boy enlisting in the First World War. The effect is evocative rather than didactic, and an arrangement of WB Yeats’s Sally Gardens is by no means the most surprising element in this unusual andausterely beautiful album. MH