Umut Adan & Zebânis

Umut Adan & Zebânis is a musical project born from the encounter between Turkish singer-songwriter Umut Adan and three Italian musicians – Andrea Marazzi, Michele Bussone, and Filippo Gillono – active members of the Turin-based collective Pietra Tonale as well as various experimental, rock, and pop outfits. They are based between Turin and Brussels.

 The collaboration began in 2018 with the goal of bringing Bahar – an album already acclaimed for its philological approach to 1970s Anatolian psychedelia – on tour.

But it is with their new work, Başka Bahar, that the relationship evolved into a fully collective, creative, compositional, and political form.

 Zebânis – a nickname given to them in Turkey, evoking the guardian demons of hell in Islamic mythology – do not merely accompany: they challenge, amplify, distort. The band functions as a hybrid and unruly ensemble, capable of moving from the tenderness of narrative folk to the brutality of noise, from ritual to desecration in the space of a few beats. Their practice draws as much from Mediterranean tradition as from a DIY aesthetic rooted in the European underground, grounded in a vision of musical production as a critical, resistant, and mobile gesture.

Başka Bahar is not just an album, but the result of a transnational process that unfolded over several years, moving through Istanbul,

Turin, and Brussels. It was recorded nomadically, lo-fi, on a single laptop carried from city to city. No vintage studios, no analog mythologies – just urgency, obsessive attention to sonic detail, and a constant desire to sabotage linearity.

The result is a sound that rejects both nostalgia and exoticism – a political and poetic response to the present, taking the form of an unstable, intensely material collage.