Kit Sebastian


Territory: DE | AT | CH

K Martin and Merve Erdem—better known together as the psychedelic, polyglot pop duo Kit Sebastian—both live in England. Merve is in London, in a neat apartment with orderly rows of books and spiraling tropical plants. K is more than an hour to the southwest, in the town of Camberley and in an apartment with a panoply of instruments and unruly stacks of records and books. But neither K nor Merve stay in England for very long, or ever really have. Merve, after all, left her native Turkey to study film in Italy a decade ago, then write her thesis in St. Louis before heading to London. Since he was a kid, K has split his life between England and France, drawn to its countryside and culture. They share a sense of being entranced with the world, intrigued by what else they can find and fold into their own lives, wherever those might lead.

Indeed, the pair wrote New Internationale—their musically irrepressible and emotionally sophisticated third album—in so many countries during so many tours and life sojourns they can barely manage to name them all: Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Turkey, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Czech Republic, and, yes, the United Kingdom. (There may be more, but let’s start there, OK?) The constituent parts of these 10 vivacious songs are like a travel log or a passport, forever stamped by and linked to the places K and Merve have been. That chorus comes from Italy though that verse is from Istanbul, and so on.

But rather than sounding stitched together from these assorted scenes, New Internationale is a riveting synthesis of the sounds and styles that have long tantalized Kit Sebastian—French pop and Anatolian psych, vintage Tropicália and early rock ’n’ roll, with breezes of soul and progblowing through the open windows of the pair’s collective imagination. Their debut for Brainfeeder, New Internationale suggests that Kit Sebastian have at last arrived at a musical crossroads they can call home, at least for now.

K wrote the first bit of New Internationale in 2018, just a year after he linked with Merve via a Facebook post where he said he hoped to collaborate with a Turkish singer. She was working in film and had been in London only two weeks, with music simply part of her life rather than its core. Their first two records, 2019’s Mantra Moderne and 2021’s Melodi, were expressions of mutual discovery, of tossing inspirations and ideas into the air like a party flooded with confetti.Those first chords are now the preamble to “Camouflage,” a duet where Kit’s teasing monotone trades with Merve’s cheery coo like alternating sides of a seesaw. Pivoting around a steel-sharp riff and buttressed by piano and drums locked into a gnarly groove, “Camouflage” wonders about the health of our relationships in a time of conspiracies and long-distance love, self-doubt and diminished expectations. It is a syncretic and magnetic rock song, Mediterranean verve crosshatched with hard funk crosshatched again with Summer of Love sonics.

New Internationale is deliberate in a way Kit Sebastian has never really been. They wrote most of it on the road, energized by the sounds they discovered as they magpied instruments during their travels—Turkish clarinet, santour, oud, gangsa, zither, harpsichord, and on and on. They cut most of the tracks in London during brief breaks, longtime drummer Theo Guttenplan and double bassist David Richardson joining a panoply of horn, string, and percussion players. And during a year off from the road, where K and Merve could concentrate on making sure the pieces moved together, they decamped to the French countryside for two weeks, leaving the distractions and moodiness of home. They captured vocals for 14 songs there in only half that time. Both Kit Sebastian’s busy touring schedule and subsequent break from it allowed Merve to step fully into these songs and their ever-shifting shapes, her confidence and versatility rising in tandem.

This combination of energy and intention is clear from the opening moments of New Internationale, where splashes of synthesizer sparkle atop a flickering oud-and-guitar lick. A portrait of greed and depravity, or what we forsake in order to forestall our fate, this is “Faust,” a four-minute retelling of an ancient tale that feels urgent and compulsive again through K and Merve’s combined voices. “The Kiss” is a dynamic love song, sliding between pep and pain as Merve contemplates what it means to give too much or take it away. “I love you/Doesn’t matter what you have been through,” she sings, her voice dipping and diving with a newfound elasticity. “It’s purity/brutality of life.”

Her aplomb becomes especially clear during a triptych of songs in Turkish, particularly “Göç Me,” or “Migrate! Don’t!” Above spy-movie guitars and horns, vertiginous keys, and percussion that flutters like an anxious heart, she speak-sings her agitation and exhaustion as she contemplates terrorism and terrible news, alienation and unrest. (She quotes late Turkish rock hero Erkin Koray, too.) This is a cool and self-assured admission of worry, deep in a way Kit Sebastian has never really been. Its counterpart is “Metropolis,” Merve’s testimonial of English immigration in which she looks for and finds new frontiers but also has to navigate the judgment of others. “Work work work/Tame your words,” a near-wicked choir taunts, demanding her to do more. Just as Kit Sebastian move between modes on New Internationale, they move, too,between complicated topics, between matters of the heart and the world we have made.

For the last year or so, K and Merve have hosted a quarterly club night in a vintage clothing shop in London. They split the evening with another DJ and spin six decades of tracks from around the world, musically globetrotting in place. They pay attention to what sends the crowd into a tizzy, just as they have done during their full-band sets. You can trace such lessons during New Internationale, in the push and pull that always takes these songs somewhere unexpected. They call their night “Club Internationale,” the precedent for the album’s name and closing title track.

There’s another impetus for the name, too. That four-minute finale may be Kit Sebastian’s most ambitious musical and lyrical statement to date, twisting like lithe prog in a very small space. Inspired by K and Merve’s recent readings about ideas of the apocalypse, it questions what comes after disaster: death or rebirth, disorder or unity? It is clear, of course, how two people who have found so much inspiration in the rest of the world want those answers to go. They ignore borders, divisions, genres. New Internationale, then, is Kit Sebastian’s rapturous, kinetic ode to a collective future.