The first time singer Derya Yıldırım met keyboarder Axel Oliveres and bassist Antonin Le Gargasson, she was sceptical: “I wasn’t sure if these guys were maybe just taking the piss.” They were two French hipsters living in east London; she was the classically trained daughter of Turkish parents living in the migrant-rich Hamburg district of Veddel. All three were a long way from Anatolia, the traditional folk music of which they’d been commissioned to reinterpret for a 2014 Hamburg arts festival.
Yıldırım didn’t speak English or French, and Oliveres and Le Gargasson didn’t speak German or Turkish. “I thought, who are these guys?”, she recalls. “If you grow up in Veddel, you are already used to being stigmatised, and then someone comes to your neighbourhood and tells you they want to make art.” But almost 10 years later the “outernational” band they formed is still going, even though they’ve still never lived in the same city at the same time. “When we started to concentrate on our instruments, we found a common language”, Yıldırım recalls. “It was like a perfect match on a date.”
