Baba Zula
Hayvan Gibi
Label: Night Dreamer
Genre: Post Rock / Avant Rock
Availability
- LP x2 €22.99 Out of Stock
In keeping with Night Dreamer’s one-take, live-to-disc ethos, for this session BaBa ZuLa rocked it live in the studio, bringing the fiery energy of a gig performance to a raw studio session so expansive it required a 2LP to do it justice. ‘It was a musicians dream,’ says Ertel of the session. ‘Cutting direct to disc and doing a whole album live from start to finish, this was a challenge for us!’ he explains. ‘This way you cannot hide anything – you have to play the whole side of the record, in the best way, with all your flaws! But I knew we could do it, because the most powerful thing for BaBa ZuLa is playing live, it is the best thing we do. We don’t need edits to do music,’ he says. ‘With this record you can get as close as you can to a live BaBa ZuLa experience’. Ertel also considers this session significant for another reason – it captures the band together just before the coronavirus pandemic separated them. ‘This record’s timing is also very important, because at the moment bands cannot perform,’ he says. ‘This makes the recording even more precious, because it was before the pandemic, and it shows the power of people playing together. The interplay between us, and the telepathy we have after more than twenty-five years together, really creates a group feeling.’ The result is an extraordinary recording that documents one of the world’s heaviest bands at a decisive moment in their twenty-five year history, putting everything into a heavy session that captures their visionary expression of classic Anadolu psychedelia at its most naturally incandescent. About Hayvan Gibi Hayvan Gibi is a concept album – the title means ‘to act with the natural grace of an animal’. Every song is named for a different creature, and title each brings with it a different story, some from the ancient past, some from BaBa ZuLa’s own history. Many of the songs have been recorded before in shorter studio versions, but on this record they are given the full live treatment.