Çaye Berbena (Dersim Yöresi) A.I. cover by Elias Marek

“Çaye Berbena,” at first glance, may seem like a folk song of love and longing, but in deep, it carries the weight of historical suffering—an echo of deep sorrow, especially reflecting the massacres of the Dersim ‘38 period. in fact, this cover turned into a hybrid piece. I joined in some parts and in a few measures I added a couple of small piano touches from outside. I only hope that, have not betrayed the memory of the song during arrangement. There were various versions of the Zazaki lyrics; it is quite possible that I have made a few errors in pronunciation or wording here and there—for that, I ask your forgiveness in advance. Finally, I should say a word about the technical side of things, Yes, every society’s popular culture and musical landscape has/may its share of “cheap” elements. But as a person (me) who has listened to a vast number of songs across many languages, I can say this—what we have in Turkiye is rather more than dramatic and an impossible. There is a certain strange vocal style, both among male and female singers, that feels unnecessarily exaggerated, almost as if deliberately performed with an overindulgent, mawkish affectation that borders on irritation. This has gone beyond the borders of fantasy or arabesque, whether it’s folk, pop, or rock—whatever the genre—there’s the same cloying texture, the same strange and brazen discomfort. Naturally, this also affects AI, since a significant portion of the Turkish-language data it is trained on is saturated with these kinds of vocal styles and interpretations. So what does this tell us? First, finding a male vocalist for Turkish-language pieces—especially—is quite difficult, sometimes even impossible. Give the man a workers march, and he’ll twist it into something resembling a lament like a gratuitously overblown—almost master’s-degree-level—cascade of kitsch ornamentation that isn’t even truly arabesque. Second, vocalists singing in Kurdish tend to display a far more grounded and measured emotionality. Thanks to them.