Tuhaf is a Copenhagen based band playing Anatolian psychedelic rock music.

The songs are homesick ballads and cries of unrequited love narrated, bawled and howled by the Turkish born lead singer Berrin Bas.

The band displays meticulous attention to gritty antique detail, but also occasionally & haphazardly digs deep & rips loose into dervish vortex toward the grand eternal ballroom of the sufi void.

2019 marked a mile stone in the bands’ history. Performances at Copenhagen jazzfestival, Cph World Music Festival, SPOT and an opening slot for Tinariwen has earned the band a well deserved position as one of Denmarks’ most exciting live acts.

In september 2019 Tuhaf released their debut EP ‘Gölgeden’ and subsequently won a Danish Music Award as “Best New Roots act 2020“

We will release our debut album ‘Mere Guld’ on September 2, 2022. Tuhaf consists of Berrin Bas (vocals) & Kristian Haarløv (guitar), Mathias Findalen (bass) and then Mads Bendsen (keys) & Rune Lohse (drums) that were added to the band in 2020. ‘Tuhaf’ is a word in Turkish – a language with many wonderful adjectives, and here we found one that means peculiar and strange, but over in the sense ‘incredible’ or ‘too good to be true’

We started as amateurs in 2013 and had basically no idea what we were doing. Berrin already sang like a dream, and Kristian insisted that if we were to make a Turkish psych band, we would first have to learn all the movements; Learn the old songs, the expression, the style, the Anatolian folk music that lies just below the rock music in it all. Berrin knew most of it in advance. The rest of us had to learn, so for the first four years we only played covers, like the Beatles in Hamburg, until we felt confident in being able to use the genre to create our own sound. The combination of diverse musicians and different styles – Anatolian folk music, indie rock, free-jazz, Danish songs and US roots rock at some point ended up being: our band Tuhaf.

A landmark moment in Tuhaf’s history was when we decided to play in Istanbul, where Kristian lived at the time. We got some gear scraped together and played a couple of top-notch gigs at Turkish bar guests for an overwhelming Turkish crowd. The whole experience of the journey and the completely magical city convinced us that we had to give Tuhaf a shot. Soon after, we started writing the songs that were to become the debut, our EP ‘Gölgeden’ in 2019. And three years later our debut album ‘More Gold’. Since then we have played a lot of concerts all over Europe

Our album is called ‘Mere Guld’ (More Gold). Berrin has the title tattooed on her fingers, and it was fitting that we had released an EP and wanted more of the same – just better. Musically, we wanted to have more Danish songs that also integrated the Turkish singing tradition. Kristian had fallen in love with 90s trance and had a need to add some of those elements to the record. At the same time, there was also a play with the 70s aesthetic, that we know and love from our own upbringing and from the Turkish psych rock that the band forever leans on.

Although Tuhaf’s lyrics are and will be Love Poetry, it is not joyous songs about falling in love that we do most in. It is rather the break, the sorrows, the conflicts and the heavy longing that are treated in the lyrics. On this record we hear about deception among friends, broken love, abuse, mental disorders, mental vulnerability, abortion and even about a conflict within the band. Our deepest wounds are always present and serve as creative depths, from which dark, informal raw mass can be kneaded into songs and with a little luck soothe the melancholy anew. To that extent, songwriting is used completely selfishly as therapy, but so far we have been lucky that it has been something listeners could reflect on, understand and maybe even use in life. This release is a beautiful portrait of Tuhaf right now – a tale of depression, anxiety, hope and infinite beauty.