BaBa ZuLa: thirty years in, XXX refuses the easy record
Seven tracks in thirty minutes from Istanbul's BaBa ZuLa: saz, dub, analogue electronics and a 75-year-old villager's protest voice in the closer.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 27 2026 · 3 min readBaBa ZuLa have been a band for thirty years, and XXX is the sound of one refusing to act like it. Seven tracks, thirty minutes and thirty seconds, all rooted in Istanbul: dub under the saz, analogue electronics over Anatolian melody, percussion that rotates instead of settling. The last voice on the record belongs to a 75-year-old villager from the Aegean coast.
The group formed in Istanbul in 1996, when Levent Akman and Osman Murat Ertel started it as a side project of the Anatolian rock band ZeN. The saz is the spine of everything since: a Turkish bouzouki-like instrument with a bright, high-pitched tone, which Ertel plays electric through effects both vintage and new. Akman handles percussion, spoons, gong and machines; Esma Ertel sings; Ümit Adakale plays darbuka, davul and bendir. They played the Kumanova Jazz Festival in 2003 and reached a wider audience through Fatih Akin's 2005 documentary Crossing the Bridge. The guest list since runs from Mad Professor and Jaki Liebezeit of Can to members of Faust and Einstürzende Neubauten, and Warren Ellis. Üç Oyundan Onyedi Müzik landed in 1999. İstanbul Sokakları landed in 2024. XXX is the ninth album, and it does not sound like a band out of road.
“This time we focused on Mother Nature. If you look at our discography, each album talks about a different aspect of Türkiye and our part of the world. Now we give voice to nature. We see forests and lands being taken from local communities. We see nature under constant pressure. We want to stand on the side of those who defend it”
It arrives on Glitterbeat Records, dated September 25, in transparent orange vinyl with a gatefold sleeve and two inserts, a digifile CD with a 16-page booklet, twenty test pressings on eco-friendly bio vinyl, and a digital edition. Akman's summary of the catalogue is plain: "Each of our albums is different. We don't like to repeat ourselves. Many bands record subsequent albums very similar to the first. For us, each album tells a new story. Perhaps that's why we've been around for thirty years." Ertel adds that the band has never chased trends or taken the easier route to a bigger audience, and that living in Istanbul rather than Berlin or London is what makes the music authentic.
What that produces on XXX is a record built on trance rather than hooks. The melodies come out of Anatolian folk, and out of the taksim, the improvised opening that eventually gives way to a groove. The production drags those lines through analogue electronics and dub echo, and the percussion treats the beat as something to turn over rather than hold down. Voices arrive and leave. Instruments take long stretches. Nothing here stays still long enough to become background.
Günlüklü Koyu Havası opens like a doorway, a taksim that never quite lands on a hook, and the record then hands its longest stretch to Balkondaki Beyaz Çoraplı Kedi, where İklim Tamkan guests and an everyday encounter between two cats on a balcony becomes a surreal miniature about desire, attention and how fast a moment goes. Kutsal Zeytin Halayı makes a quick hymn of the olive tree, and of memory, light and continuity across the Mediterranean.
Cırtlak 9 and Has Halhal Dansı sit between the titled stories as connective tissue, short plates that keep the sequence moving. Otel Kaliforniya, Tamkan back again, takes a title every listener already knows and points it at privatization, tourism-driven development and the sale of public life, which is the sharpest joke on the record. Then Hak Bitmez Güç Bitee closes it with the voice of Hatice Kocalar, a 75-year-old villager whose protest against government policies affecting her community and the land became emblematic of wider grassroots resistance. Esma Ertel says the band gave voice to nature this time, to forests and land under pressure, and the closing track turns that into a demand.
The audience is already there, or should be: anyone who came to this music through Altın Gün, Gaye Su Akyol or Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek is listening one step downstream of BaBa ZuLa. Add Can and early Floyd ears, dub heads, and anyone who wants a band that treats thirty years as a licence rather than an ending. If you need a chorus every ninety seconds, you will be gone early.
The one real problem is proportion. Balkondaki Beyaz Çoraplı Kedi is the longest track and the thinnest idea, and the half hour spends too much of itself there, so the better sequence, Kutsal Zeytin Halayı into Otel Kaliforniya, arrives late and leaves early. Everything else holds. XXX does not repeat itself once across the whole runtime, which is more than most bands with a tenth of the mileage manage, and four of five is the honest number for a record this specific and this alive.
