Marcello Giannini spent time working out how to make his electric guitar speak in Turkish makam: microtonal intervals that fall between the fixed frets of a Western instrument. He gets there with a slide, bending the strings into those pitches, and that sound opens Psyché’s latest single, “Yallah!”, featuring Istanbul-based singer Merve Daşdemir. Daşdemir, formerly of Altın Gün, sings in Turkish, recorded close and dry, with almost no reverb.

For the first two minutes of “Yallah!” the instruments stay locked in a mid-tempo pattern. Two minutes in, Andrea De Fazio changes to a four-on-the-floor kick drum. Paolo Petrella’s bassline deepens, the beat straightens, and the arrangement moves from the initial pace to a faster, driven section described by the band as Arab techno-rock. Giannini’s guitar figure continues underneath, now placed against the drums rather than leading. When the song returns to its opening groove, it lands differently: the central beat switch has shifted the track’s balance. Daşdemir keeps returning to “az laf çok iş”, Turkish for “less talk, more action”, using the phrase as a refrain that hardens as the rhythm changes around it. 

Psyché are four players who have been working in Naples for over twenty years, mostly in overlapping projects. Giannini and De Fazio played together in Arduo. De Fazio, Paolo Petrella and Roberto Porzio were in the Revenaz Quartet. All three founding members worked as the rhythm section for Nu Genea’s live band, and after a tour with them in 2018 they started Psyché as a way to strip things down: fewer instruments, more space to improvise. Their first album came out on Four Flies Records in May 2023. Porzio joined on synth a year later.

“Yallah!” is the third single from Psyché II, out on 27 March on Four Flies Records. An instrumental live version recorded at Auditorium Novecento in Naples in March 2025 accompanies the release. The album also features Tunisian oud player Ziad Trabelsi and includes styles from the Balkans, Anatolia, the Maghreb, Brazil and Colombia., an approach the band describe simply as “world music“.

Stream and get your copy of Psyché II via THIS LINK