DERYA YILDIRIM

Derya Yildirim is a Turkish, Berlin-based singer and multi-instrumentalist who combines Anatolian folk music with psychedelic and progressive sounds. While her music is folk-based, she strongly believes that folk music is not nostalgia. It’s not a frozen tradition meant only to be preserved. It is movement, change, and expression — a reflection of society itself. Derya Yıldırım stands for exactly that: music that tells stories, passed on and reimagined with every voice that sings it - whether performing with her band, Grup Şimşek, which veers closer to the psychedelic end of the spectrum, or solo, where she emphasizez her folk roots a little more.

This is a very rare opportunity to see her in such an intimate setting...

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DERYA YILDIRIM

As a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Yıldırım has become a central figure in the contemporary Anatolian music scene. Raised in a musical household where songs were woven into everyday life, she first encountered the bağlama — the iconic Anatolian lute — not on stage, but in family gatherings. Her practice later expanded into formal study at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg and the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2024, she also shares her expertise as a bağlama lecturer at Germany’s Popakademie Baden-Württemberg.

With her group Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, she is part of a global movement that embraces folk songs not as fixed tradition but as living, breathing art. The band’s fourth album, Yarın Yoksa (“If There Is No Tomorrow”), was released in March 2025 on New York’s Big Crown Records.

This summer, Yıldırım is on tour in the U.S. — first with a special solo appearance in New York, followed by a West Coast tour with Grup Şimşek starting July 29.

In her solo concerts, Yıldırım returns to the essence: voice and bağlama. She doesn’t simply reinterpret traditional songs — she lets them live on, in a space where genres dissolve and emotion leads. The bağlama becomes a voice of its own: tender, fierce, intimate, collective.

“The bağlama belongs on the main stages — not as a niche instrument, but as a natural part of the contemporary music landscape.”

Her music speaks of longing and resistance, of migration and identity, of stories that need to be told.

A concert by Derya Yıldırım is no nostalgic glance backward — it’s a living dialogue between past, present, and future. A sound both rooted and forward-looking, melancholic and electrifying.

$20

Pay now or that night in person

DERYA YILDIRIM (solo)

DERYA YILDIRIM (solo)