A saz line loops under a drum machine, tonal chasing microtonal like a conversation across five decades. This is the sound of Islandman, the Istanbul trio turning Anatolia’s psychedelic folk traditions into a living dancefloor ritual. From Montreux to Paradiso, their music proves the past isn’t an archive—it’s an instrument still being played.
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From Solo Project to Trio
Islandman began as the solo project of Tolga Böyük, a producer and multi-instrumentalist who grew up in Istanbul immersed in the city’s 1970s psychedelic scene. He started producing under the Islandman name in 2010 and built his sound around the Turkish saz, the long-necked lute also known as the bağlama.
“I think it’s the signature sound of these lands,” he has said. “When I want to add a melody I always refer back to saz, even if I’m playing synth or electric guitar.”
The project became a trio when guitarist Erdem Başer and percussionist Eralp Güven joined Böyük’s live shows, completing a lineup built for the stage as much as the studio.
Başer’s psychedelic guitar work and Güven’s meditative, shamanic rhythms gave the project the muscle to move from bedroom production into festival sets, and the group has described itself since as a sonic collective with no fixed borders.
Heirs to Anatolia's Psychedelic Golden Age
Islandman calls its sound Neo-Turkish Psychedelia, and the lineage is direct. The band cites Okay Temiz, Eden Ahbez, and Can Kozlu among its formative influences, alongside Baba Zula — the Istanbul group that saz player Osman Murat Ertel built in 1996 out of the same 1960s scene that first fused Anatolian folk with Western rock.
In November 2020, Islandman performed alongside Baba Zula on the Bosphorus for the EFG London Jazz Festival’s “Istanbul Psychedelic” session, sharing a bill with the genre’s own pioneers, Moğollar, led by Cahit Berkay since 1967.
The debt surfaces inside the music itself. “Ala Geyik,” a track from Islandman’s 2025 album, takes its title from an Anatolian folk tale about a red deer and a hunter — the same title Moğollar used for a song in the 1970s.
“They are a great inspiration to us,” Tolga Böyük has said of the band.
Even the poetry runs deep: another track draws on a poem by the 13th-century mystic Rumi, born in Anatolia and still one of the region’s most quoted voices.
Islandman's Impact on Turkish Music
While international icons like Kevin Parker (Tame Impala) and Elijah Wood have helped turn 1960s and 1970s Turkish psychedelic legends—such as Barış Manço, Selda Bağcan, and Mustafa Özkent—into global cult favorites, the genre originally faced pushback at home.
In the 1970s, pioneering fusions of traditional türkü melodies with Western rock and dance rhythms were often dismissed by local critics and ballroom audiences as “deforming” folk music.
Decades later, however, the digital era changed everything; crate-diggers, global re-releases, and initiatives like the Anatolian Rock Revival Project transformed these forgotten vinyl pressings into a worldwide phenomenon.
This is the exact cultural foundation where Islandman’s impact becomes vital for contemporary Turkish music. Rather than just relying on retrospective samples of that 1970s golden era, Islandman represents the modern evolution of this legacy.
By looping the acoustic saz with stuttering synthesizers and dancefloor-driven drum machines, Tolga Böyük and his bandmates carry the original core question of pioneers like Mustafa Özken.
“Why shouldn’t our young people dance to our music?”
Through their global tours and award-winning live rituals, Islandman has proven that Anatolian folk is not just a nostalgic artifact for internet collectors, but a fluid, living instrument that continues to shape the international electronic dancefloor today.
Five Albums & One Evolving Ritual
Böyük’s solo debut as Islandman, Rest in Space (2017), introduced a dreamy, Balearic-tinged sound that was gentle but conceptually dense. Kaybola followed in 2020 on the Danish label Music For Dreams, mapping a more conscious fusion of Anatolian and Western sensibilities.
Its opening track, “Dimitro,” pairs an 808 drum-machine pulse with sampled vocals from a Bulgarian wedding song, while “Sem Você” brings in Ibiza veteran DJ Pippi and the Brazilian-Danish group Copenema.
Godless Ceremony (2021) turned inward toward a more introspective, organic architecture, and Popsicle Obstacle (2023) pushed the project from what the band calls the dream-state of the archaic toward a more digital, technological register.
Island5, released in October 2025, marks a deliberate reversal: the trio built a new studio from scratch and recorded the entire album on analog synths, pedals, and drums, ditching digital production altogether.
“This album was a bridge from the end of a ten year journey into the start of a new era for us,” Böyük has said of the record.
A Trio the World Keeps Booking
Islandman won a Talent Award at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2018, and the recognition opened doors well beyond Turkey. The trio has since played the Amsterdam Dance Event, Thailand’s Wonderfruit Festival, and Amsterdam’s Paradiso, and returned to Zurich’s Jazzclub Moods for sold-out shows across three separate years.
Touring dates for 2026 stretch from Paris and Antwerp to London and Bristol, with a stop in Hamburg already booked for 2027. Onstage, the trio strips its layered records back to something closer to ceremony: live electronics, spacey guitar, and hand percussion, built to move a room the way a ritual might.
Listeners abroad often meet Islandman before they ever set foot in Istanbul, but the sound was built here, in a city where the Ottoman, the Anatolian, and the electronic have always shared the same street.
Explore Musical Side of Istanbul with Us
Islandman’s Istanbul is not the one on postcards. It’s the basement clubs of Kadıköy, the late-night venues off Istiklal Avenue, and the converted warehouses of Karaköy — neighbourhoods where Ottoman façades, Anatolian folk instruments, and analog synthesizers have learned to coexist.
A private guide from The Other Tour can lead you into that layered city beyond the standard sights, from the sound of a saz drifting out of a Kadıköy record shop to the Bosphorus itself, where a trio once played for the cameras and turned fifty years of Anatolian psychedelia into a single, unbroken line.
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love their sound! thanks for sharing. i’m particularly in love with the second song on the album called Rüzgar 🙂
they’re pretty great! we can’t stop listening to them these days..
Don’t just listen to them. Catch them live whenever you get the chance… Highly recommended!
Can’t argue with that!