Ahmet Ali Arslan

Mersin, a detour through America, a return in 2014

Ahmet Ali Arslan was born in 1991 in Mersin and grew up in Istanbul before leaving for university in the United States. He came back in 2014 and started putting demos out. In an interview published on 25 May 2020 he was unguarded about how close the decision had been: sound engineering, archival work and electrical engineering were all still on the table when the response to those first recordings settled the matter. What pulled him in, by his own account, was less the making of records than the traffic between a musician and the people listening to one.

The two formative records he names are an odd pair. One is İsmail Hakkı Demircioğlu's Sevdalı Kuş, a touchstone of the Anatolian plucked-string repertoire; the other is The Beatles. In the same interview he described writing as something that happens outdoors or turned inward, with melodies arriving first and lyrics following slowly behind — a working order that explains a good deal about where his catalogue eventually went.

Oud, fretless guitar, and a refusal to name the genre

The instrumental base is oud and fretless guitar, and the material sits between Turkish art music and folk without committing to either. Asked in 2020 to put a name to it, Arslan offered two half-serious options — hafif Türkçe şehir müziği, light Turkish city music, or simply singer-songwriter — and declined to be pinned further. The streaming services have been no more decisive: Yangı is filed as singer-songwriter, Manastır as world music, and the same performer is behind both.

That refusal is not evasion so much as an accurate description of the catalogue. The songs use modal material and a plucked-string vocabulary that come out of Anatolian tradition, but they are built as short, self-contained songs with a voice at the front, closer in shape to the Istanbul alternative scene he plays to than to any folk revival.

Günaşığı to Yangı: the records

Before the albums came two EPs, Bahara Övgü and Su Akar Deli Bakar. The first full-length, Günaşığı, arrived in 2018, followed by Dünyalarız Uzakta in 2019 and, the same year, Bahçeden (Canlı) — a live album drawn from the Bahçeden Canlı sessions, a recurring format in which he brought other musicians in as guests rather than as a fixed band.

Singles carried the next stretch: Bal Peteğim in 2020, then Çıplaktı Derede and Un Ufak in 2021. Yeni Bir Kabuk followed in 2022, with Kumrular Gibi released alongside it. Collaborations ran in parallel, among them Mor with the drummer Berke Can Özcan and, later, Ormandaki Kuş.

Yangı, released on 26 April 2024, is the most compact thing he has made: eight songs in 26 minutes, put out under his own name with no label imprint on the copyright line. Three singles surrounded it in the same year — Oyun with Gülinler, Yeni Hayat with Şenceylik, and Bakir Masal — and the guest credits on them map fairly precisely onto the circle of Istanbul players he shares stages with.

Manastır: fifteen pieces named after places

Manastır, released on 20 June 2025 through Kura Records, is the record that reset expectations. Fifteen tracks, one hour and fifteen minutes — nearly three times the running time of Yangı — and a title sequence that reads as a map rather than a set of sentiments. Ayvalık'ta Bayram Sabahı opens it; Demircidere, Göknar Yolu, Bergama'dan Dönerken, Ahmetçe, Kemer and Manastır Yolu follow the north Aegean inland and back, and Nisyros crosses the water to the Greek island of the same name. Two titles are addresses: Çeşme Sokak No 3, and Yeldeğirmeni Sokak, which points back to the Kadıköy neighbourhood in Istanbul.

Four of the fifteen are lullabies named for individuals — Derviş'in Ninnisi, Serdar'ın Ninnisi, Yuno'nun Ninnisi, Derin'in Ninnisi. Arslan is credited as performer, composer and producer across the record, with guest composers appearing on the tracks. Since its release his billing has widened accordingly: alongside the song sets, promoters now describe instrumental concerts and children's theatre work as part of the same practice.

Where things stand in September 2026

Arslan is listed as actively touring, with 36 past shows logged and just under two thousand people signed up for his concert alerts. The recent run is entirely Istanbul and entirely in small rooms: Paribu Art's Yan Sahne on 13 December 2025, Babylon on 28 January 2026, istos sahne in the Büyük Zarifi Apartmanı on 26 March 2026, and JJ Pub Kanyon on 15 May 2026. No dates outside Turkey appear anywhere in the listings.

One date is currently on sale: Tuesday 6 October 2026 at Blind, on Şehbender Sokak in Asmalımescit, a few minutes off İstiklal. No support act has been announced for it. Fifteen months on from Manastır, nothing has been announced to follow the album either, which makes the October show the only fixed point in the diary.

The show

The most useful recent account of an Arslan set comes from the March 2026 istos billing, which promised the broken-hearted songs he had accumulated over years and described the delivery as urban and warm. The detail worth holding onto from that night is that the set mixed settled material with songs still in progress — unfinished work played in public is a habit rather than an accident, and it is part of why the same songs turn up in different shapes from room to room.

The venues do most of the framing. istos is a floor of an apartment building; JJ Pub sits inside a shopping centre; Blind is a club room; Babylon is the largest of them and still holds only a few hundred. Nothing about the recent run suggests production beyond players and a room, and the Babylon night was built as a shared bill with another act from the same scene rather than as a headline package with an opener.