Göksel

Philosophy, abandoned for a microphone stand

Göksel Demirpençe was born in Istanbul on 25 November 1971. She entered Boğaziçi University in 1988 to read philosophy and left before finishing, having decided that music was the thing she intended to do with her life. What followed was the unglamorous apprenticeship route rather than a talent-show shortcut: private singing lessons, work with a succession of orchestras, and two years standing behind other people — she sang backing vocals for Sezen Aksu and Sertab Erener before anyone bought a record with her own name on it.

That groundwork shows in how she arrived. Her debut album Yollar was released in September 1997, and the single "Sabır" gave her a hit large enough to settle the question of whether the gamble had been worth taking. She was almost 26, which in Turkish pop of the late 1990s made her a late starter, and the voice on that first record already had the slightly withheld quality that has kept it recognisable through nearly three decades of releases.

The run of albums, and then the singles

The decade after Yollar was her most productive. Körebe arrived in 2001, Söz Ver in 2003, Arka Bahçem on 17 March 2005 and Ay'da Yürüdüm on 25 April 2007, all through Sony Music. Mektubumu Buldun mu? followed on 15 April 2009, with a compilation, The Best of Göksel, the same year. Hayat Rüya Gibi, a covers set, came on 26 April 2010, then Bende Bi' Aşk Var on 18 January 2012 and Sen Orda Yoksun on 14 January 2015. Her later catalogue moved to Avrupa Müzik and Soles Müzik.

She has also worked well outside her own lane. In 2004 she sang "Dursun zaman" with the rock band maNga; in 2018 she turned up on "Duruyor Dünya" with the electronic producer Hey Douglas. Both pairings suggest a singer who is comfortable being borrowed rather than guarding a format.

Then the albums stopped. From 2015 onwards the output was singles: "Burda Kalayım" in 2023, "Bıçak" in 2024, "Pardon" and "Olmaz mı?" in 2025, along with the digital-only B'Aşka Şarkılar on 10 May 2024. It was long enough that Turkish music press began treating her as a figure to be remembered rather than followed.

Rüyaların İşi, 15 May 2026

Rüyaların İşi — roughly, the work of dreams — was released on 15 May 2026 through Soles Müzik and Avrupa Müzik, and was reported across the Turkish music press as her tenth album and her first full record in eleven years. It runs twelve tracks and about thirty-four minutes. Eleven of the twelve are written and composed by Göksel; the exception is "Ay", a duet with Mabel Matiz. The opening track, "Be Oğlum", was given a video directed by Aytekin Yalçın. Two singles went out ahead of the album, "Alev Alev" on 27 March 2026 and "Peki Öyle Olsun".

The title is not decorative. In an interview published around the release she explained that she treats songs and dreams as the same kind of object, each carrying several emotions at once, and that she writes dreams down at night and returns to them later. "Uzaktan" was written on waking. "Açık Yara" took nearly twenty-four hours without sleep to finish. In the same conversation she set herself against music generated by AI, on the grounds that the time spent making a song is part of what the song is — an argument about process rather than output, and one she volunteered without being pushed.

Sequenced end to end, the record traces a single relationship: uncertainty, game-playing, rising tension, the swings, a stretch of solitary reckoning, and a goodbye. A long retrospective essay by Heja Bozyel in Rast Magazine read the eleven-year gap as a period of change rather than dormancy, placing the album at the end of a twenty-nine-year career rather than as an attempt to restart one. The songs it singled out were "Alev Alev", "Peki Öyle Olsun", "Uyutmuyor", "İmkansızım" and "Be Oğlum". The night before release, on 14 May 2026, she played the record to an invited room at Bantmag's venue in Istanbul in conversation with Okan Ürün.

Where she stands in October 2026

The album has been followed by the Rüyaların İşi Tour, which has kept her working through the Turkish summer season and into autumn. Recent dates logged by concert trackers include the Altınoluk amphitheatre in Balıkesir on 14 August, Milyonfest Didim in Aydın on 5 September and Paribu Vadi Açıkhava in Istanbul on 27 September. Ahead of her are a two-day Istanbul festival appearance on 17 and 18 October, Kulturhaus Mannheim-Käfertal in Germany on 13 November, and TivoliVredenburg's Grote Zaal in Utrecht on 5 December — currently the only date left on general sale, and her sole Dutch show of the year.

Her live record is documented unevenly. Setlist.fm holds only twelve Göksel setlists in total, with the Harbiye Cemil Topuzlu open-air theatre in Istanbul appearing most often at three entries, and the most recent fully logged Turkish shows being İzmit Urban Square on 6 December 2025 and the Erciyes Kültür Merkezi in Kayseri on 6 March 2026. Older entries reach back to 312 Arena in Ankara on 15 January 2011 and Paradiso Noord in Amsterdam on 20 December 2019, and the database also lists Australian dates. The thinness of that archive says more about who attends her concerts than about how many she plays: the audience is Turkish and diaspora rather than setlist-logging, and the tour is tracked by ticket sellers instead.

The Harbiye nights

The album's first Istanbul concert was at the Harbiye Cemil Topuzlu open-air theatre on 22 June 2026, with a 9pm start, and it is the show most of the reporting rests on. Coverage published on 24 June described a set built on the new material with two unannounced guests folded into it: Gazapizm came out to rap over "Sen Orda Yoksun", and Kalben, who had come to watch, was called up during "Depresyondayım". The Gazapizm duet drew the loudest response of the night and travelled furthest afterwards, with clips circulating widely. Reports also dwelt on her stage costumes, which were part of the production rather than incidental, and on a performance that several writers argued made the recorded versions sound thinner by comparison.

She returned to the same stage on 11 August 2026, again at 9pm, as the opening night of a seven-concert run at Harbiye that ran to 17 August and also featured Gökhan Türkmen, Kenan Doğulu and Yıldız Tilbe. Listings for that show set the expectation plainly: new songs sitting alongside older ones including "Uzaktan", "Yalnız Kuş", "Gittiğinde" and "Acıyor", with a number of them re-arranged acoustically, and a shape that alternates between up-tempo pop and the slower, bleaker end of her catalogue. The venue's conditions are standard for Harbiye and worth knowing in advance: no children under six, tickets required from six upwards, no professional cameras or recording gear, no food or drink brought in, no animals, and no readmission once a ticket-holder leaves.