Mercan Dede

Mercan Dede — Biography

Mercan Dede, born Arkın Ilıcalı in 1966 in Bursa, is a Turkish-Canadian composer, producer, ney and bendir player, and DJ who performs electronic sets under the name DJ Arkin Allen. A world music artist, he blends the acoustic spirit of Sufi music and Eastern melodies with electronic sounds, and has built an international following through that fusion.

He turned to music early, taking up the ney around the age of fifteen and later adding percussion and string instruments such as the bendir and the oud. He trained through traditional channels under Sufi music masters, among them Nezih Uzel and the ney player Ömer Erdoğdular, and also learned the ebru marbling art from Niyazi Sayın. The teachings of Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî became the core inspiration of his art. After studying journalism and photography at Istanbul University, he emigrated to Canada in 1997, settling in Montreal, where he completed fine arts degrees at Concordia University. There he was struck by techno's capacity to gather people in a shared euphoric trance. In 1997 he founded the Mercan Dede Ensemble; he took the name from a character in İhsan Oktay Anar's novel Kitab-ül Hiyel, and in Sufi culture dede is an honorific given to spiritual elders.

His first album, Sufi Dreams (1998), appeared on the independent Golden Horn label and gained wider notice when its music featured in a German television documentary on Sufi culture. Journeys of a Dervish (1999) was followed by Seyahatname (2001), composed for a dance piece choreographed by Beyhan Murphy, and by Nar (2002). Su (2004), recorded with an international lineup, spent two months at the top of the European World Music Charts; Nefes and 800 (2007), the latter named for the 800th anniversary of Rûmî's birth, continued the run, with 800 also reaching number one. In 2013 he released the two-part album Dünya. Nominated twice for the BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music, he has collaborated with Susheela Raman, Azam Ali, Dhafer Youssef, Sheema Mukherjee of Transglobal Underground, Hugh Marsh and Ceza, and performs with an ensemble of Turkish percussion, clarinet and kanun players alongside a Canadian drummer. He appeared in Fatih Akın's 2005 documentary İstanbul Hatırası: Köprüyü Geçmek, and his visual art spanning three decades was exhibited at Casa Botter in Istanbul in 2023-2024.