It’s weird to discover over the course of a few days a city overtaken by clichés. Istanbul is a city stuck in the balance between tradition and modernity, between the Occident and the Orient, mysterious and elusive, people were telling us. And musically, it’s a city that can’t escape an image established by a single film. This film, Crossing the Bridge, is Faith Akin’s documentary about the Istanbul music scene that everyone talks about. It’s impossible to look into the Istanbul scene without being asked if we’d seen Crossing the Bridge. And so we watched it. As a result, we thought we knew exactly what awaited us, and of course we were completely wrong.

We were ready to discover Istanbul’s scene and a particular brand of well-formatted musical crossbreeding. What we saw was considerably more exciting. Our first night was a whirlwind. In the narrow back alleys of the Tunnel neighborhood we came across bars in complete disarray, with masses of young club-goers packed onto terraces, music everywhere, and a concert venue filled with hundreds of girls and boys dancing to the songs of some British Neo-New Wave band. And there are musicians, lots of them, who play indie, folk and electro and who take a bit of everything from everywhere, more or less losing their cool when we talk to them about the sort of bands who become popular by cribbing from world music.

Istanbul is an exciting, frenzied city, and there’s plenty of desire even if the means aren’t always there. Lots of bands we saw were fairly rough around the edges for lack of a place to rehearse or record, or for lack of interest in their music. But the joy and the eagerness to play are there. Istanbul’s youthful musical scene left us some beautiful memories, and asked only that we remember it exists.

Chryde – La Blogothèque

• Babylon
  A label, a venue, a bar, a restaurant and a festival organizer, Babylon is the very nerve center of rock and pop in Istanbul. If you find yourself in the Tünel neighborhood, be sure to stop by 
• Peyote 
  On the ground floor there’s a nightclub, on the first floor a concert venue and on top there’s a sprawling terrace with a view of the city. A real cosmopolitan place… just like Istanbul
• The Season of Turkey in France 
  France is celebrating Turkey over the course of a whole year, and the official site of this operation overflows with information about the country
• Underground Turkey 
  The best French-language blog on Turkish independent music
• “Le Bain Turc” 
  The blog of a French journalist abroad in Istanbul