A newspaper contest invented it in 1965 and a military coup shut it down in 1980. In the fifteen years between, a generation ran Anatolian folk melodies through fuzz pedals and built a sound that existed nowhere else on earth.
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In 1965 the Turkish daily Hürriyet launched a contest called the Altın Mikrofon, or Golden Microphone. It set one condition for entry: take Turkish music somewhere new using the techniques, forms and instruments of the West.
Seventy-eight acts entered the first year. The paper pressed the top finishers onto 45s and sent them touring through Anatolian cities, where audiences voted by writing a band's name on their ticket stub and dropping it in a box. It ran four times and stopped.
The music and the politics run here as two columns. One reads as a golden age, the other as a country coming apart. They meet in September 1980.
Hürriyet launches the contest that names the ambition out loud.
The 1961 constitution opens space for the left and for organised labour. Campuses politicise fast, and "turn toward the people" replaces plain admiration of the West.
Five musicians set out to write pop in an Anatolian idiom rather than translate someone else's.
They go without a singer, find record company numbers in a café phone book, and land a deal.
Danses et Rythmes de la Turquie, an instrumental record made in France and released at home as Anadolu Pop. It takes the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles Cros, an award previously given to Hendrix and Pink Floyd.
The military forces the government out by letter rather than tanks. Martial law follows in much of the country.
Six singles in her final year at university, folk songs carried by a direct voice and a guitar. National fame almost immediately.
Barış Manço assembles the band he will keep for the rest of his career, named after a train that ran from Istanbul to a town in the southeast.
Erkin Koray's first album of new material, and the record most people mean when they say Anatolian rock: electric saz, microtonal melody, and a rhythm section that doesn't apologise.
Manço's first real LP. The title track is written for a centenary still fifty years away; "Baykoca Destanı" is among the first Turkish rock operas.
Shots are fired into a May Day crowd of hundreds of thousands. Dozens die. Street violence between left and right becomes routine.
Koray pushes further into progressive territory, records partly in the Netherlands, and tours Europe.
Cem Karaca names his new band for the country's westernmost and easternmost provinces. By now his lyrics are explicitly about class, and everyone knows it.
Sectarian killings, an economy in crisis, a parliament unable to function.
He leaves on business. He will not be able to come back for eight years.
12 · 09 · 1980
General Kenan Evren takes power. Parties are shut, and writers, journalists and musicians are among the hundreds of thousands detained in the years that follow. The genre had spent fifteen years learning to say something.
Each one with the record worth starting on.
Playing rock in Istanbul since the late 1950s, before there was an audience for it. He was reportedly attacked in the street over his hair. He electrified the bağlama, which is what put a folk instrument through a rock amplifier. Stubborn, prolific, never quite absorbed into anyone else's scene. Died in Toronto in 2023.
Start with Elektronik Türküler (1974), the track "Cemalim".
The band that proved the idea worked at album length, and the first to be taken seriously outside Turkey. Their Paris record gave the movement its Turkish name, Anadolu Pop, and a French prize that made everyone at home pay attention. Still performing, more than fifty years on.
Start with Danses et Rythmes de la Turquie (1971), the track "Lorke".
Long hair, heavy rings, and a gift for writing songs that were ambitious and singable at the same time. He made a rock opera and a nursery-rhyme hit in the same decade. In 1988 he began a television programme for children that ran for ten years and turned him into something closer to a national uncle than a rock star.
Start with 2023 (1975), the track "Baykoca Destanı".
Born to actor parents, Armenian and Azerbaijani. He cycled through bands (Apaşlar, Kardaşlar, Dervişan, Edirdahan) and called himself a rock ozan, a rock bard. He wrote about workers and apprentices with a theatrical delivery that made the politics land. It cost him his citizenship.
Start with the singles era, the track "Tamirci Çırağı".
An engineering physics student who became the voice the left sang along to. Folk repertoire, electric arrangements, and a delivery with no ornament in it. The junta jailed her three times and lost every case, then simply kept her passport. Decades later her recordings turned up sampled on hip-hop records.
Start with Selda (1976), the track "Koçero".
Came up through the same Altın Mikrofon years and then moved steadily away from volume, toward songwriting stripped back to voice and saz. The introvert's entry point into a loud genre.
Start with the track "Not Defterimden".
Onur, Haldun and Feridun Hürel, working as a trio with a homemade approach to instruments and effects. Warmer and stranger than the big names, and a favourite of collectors for exactly that reason.
Start with the track "Ağlarsa Anam Ağlar".
Arrived through a later revival of the contest format and carried the protest strand of the music into the late seventies with a heavier, more direct band sound.
Start with the track "Aldırma Gönül".
Every pitch here is tuned to Turkish makam intervals, which sit in the gaps between the twelve notes of a piano. The riff locks and repeats; the fuzz, phaser and drum kit are the electrification the Altın Mikrofon was asking for. Press play, then move the fuzz.
Gold is the accented first beat of each group, pink the other notes, gaps are rests. Height is pitch.
Keyboard row A S D F G H J K, or click. Hold Shift for the octave above.
Sound stops when you scroll away. Every control, including wah, tremolo, reverb and the drum mix, is in the full version.
The records kept circulating through crate diggers, reissue labels and samples, and the sound returned to Istanbul partly by way of people who had found it somewhere else. The revival is now larger internationally than the original ever was.
The name travelled less well than the music. Spotify files it as anadolu rock, alongside tags for Turkish rock and Turkish alternative rock. Record shops and reissue labels mostly say Turkish psych. English-language writing settled on Anatolian rock, which is what this page uses.
Founded in Istanbul, folding dub and electronics into the saz. The bridge between the old scene and whatever came next.
Painter and anthropologist turned bandleader. Psychedelia, surf and post-punk under an unmistakably Anatolian melodic sense.
Started in Amsterdam by a Dutch bassist who advertised for Turkish musicians. Their 2019 album Gece was nominated for a Grammy.
Hamburg-based, playing Anatolian folk material with a rock band from outside Turkey entirely.
Ordered to be played straight through.
Play the sequence on Spotify Nine tracks, in this order. The links under each track below go to YouTube instead.
Side A · the golden years