Honest Jon’s, the London-based label that has just released Actress’s Splazsh, this week delves into the archive for a compilation entitled To Scratch Your Heart: Early Recordings From Instanbul.

The tracklist is drawn from recordings made in Istanbul by the Gramophone Company and HMV in the years 1900-30. According to Honest Jon’s, “it crosses and mixes the folk and classical heritage of Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Gypsies, Muslims, Christians and Jews, urbanites and country-people, and the demands of tradition and modernity, musical improvisation, composition and system.”

The music has bee restored at Abbey Road, and is presented here in luxurious 4xLP and 2xCD editions, both fully annotated and featuring rare photographs.

“Most of the singers here are ‘hafiz’,” the label explains, “versed in a musical reading of the Koran, and renowned for mastery of the exalted, improvisatory form of the ‘gazel’: there are several magnificent examples here, by legendary artists. Three gazelhans beautifully interpret folk songs, and another contributor, the folklorist Agyazar Efendi, sings a long Armenian air with utter authenticity, but in the style of a gazel. Exemplifying the new political freedoms of the Republic, there are two heart-melting female vocal performances of a kind of art-song called ‘sarki’. Also featured is the ‘taksim’, a kind of improvisation in which one-off musical fireworks, designed to ravish the listener’s soul, illuminate deep fluency in the ‘makam’: a who’s who of the pre-eminent instrumentalists of this first half-century of Turkish recording, in performances which are simply stunning — breath-taking, exquisite and other-worldly.”

Cop the tracklist and listen to clips here.