25 February 2009

Les Mogol - 1971 - Dances and Rhythms of Turkey of Yesterday and Today

Quality: 3.5 out of 5
Trip-O-Meter: 2.75 out of 5

As the trip-o-meter indicates, this is far from the most psychedelic thing you'll hear at the Psychedelic Garage. Les Mogol were a group of Turkish string players focused for the most part on the folk styles of their native country. This was the late 60's, however, and these young fellows tried to add a bit of psychedelic flourish to keep up with the times. Unlike typical psychedelic exploitation, it works really well on this album and presents an interesting counterpoint to the more straight ahead stuff.

"Lorke," which is the first full song on the album, is about as psychedelic as the album gets with a Turkish melody played on organ glides upon trance-like percussion. It's a pretty cool melding of styles. "Ilgaz" follows with a style more representative of the album. The tune comes across as having roots in Turkish folk, but the structure and instrumentation is a nod toward the San Francisco rock sound. Most of the highlights come closer to the end of the album. "Ziganalar'dan Gecis" fares well by focusing on some of the more exotic string instruments. "Mogol Halay" ups the psych quotient with some fuzzed-out guitar leads and "Cigrik" comes across as a proper psychedelic pop song.

The execution is not quite as assured as it could be, and there are some noticible bland stretches on this album, but it's worth a listen or two for the highlight. We practically demand that modern music makes an attempt at genre bending, but this is pretty far ahead of the curve in that respect, and it make Les Mogol historically interesting if nothing else.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://rapidshare.com/files/192972966/Les_Mogol.rar

Anonymous said...

thanks looks superb. keep em coming!

joe v berlin said...

thank you for this obscurity

Anonymous said...

The band is actually called MOGOLAR and has released numerous LPs from the early '70s right up through the current decade, i.e. they remain an active (albeit occasional) entity in Turkey.

John Berg, a fan in Seattle

bird of pray said...

The band's name is MOGOLLAR with double "L" and they still gig in Turkey.

You can publish and love some stuff from Erkin Koray, Baris Manco also.

E.mail me if you can't find anything on web, i can zip and send you some stuff.

I really love this blog.
Keep up the good work and thanks for everything.

Alp, From Turkey - Istanbul

Dr. Schluss said...

I actually had a time with the name when writing the review. I kept finding references to Mogollar, but I had the impression that the name was changed for this album. You may note that I did name the folder Mogollar.

I have Erin Koray stuff, so he might end up here at some point. I must admit that I'm not familiar with Baris Manco (but his last name is a dirty word in Japanese!).

icastico said...

I love this record.
Others who do may like these
http://penmallet.blogspot.com/search/label/para_helion

Scott said...

nice job with the mogolar. i have some in my library with different spellings (1 L, 2 Ls) so i'm not really sure either. still, this is good stuff. thank you very much.

bird of pray said...

Manço was turkish also.

He worked with Moğollar for 2 years.
He was the lead singer of the band.
They recorded some albums which became popular.

I know that his name means woman's genitals in japanese...
He toured japan between 1992 - 1996.


http://progressive.homestead.com/Baris_Manco.html

This link has some info on Manço and also Moğollar... etc.

Anonymous said...

You know, I knew Manco was popular in Japan, but never really understood why. Until I read the comments here...

-A Turkish guy

Anonymous said...

Wordy; but Mancho was really great.

Unknown said...

I went to their concert in July (Mogollar + Erkin Koray), and they were great man, caused me 2 buzzing ears, through the whole week.

you may want to check out
"Timur Selcuk" he's great too.
he can be funny and dead serious at the same time...colorful voice, great instrumental, he once constructed an orchestra.