Karadeniz music covers the folk music of the Turkish Black Sea coast (Trabzon, Rize, Artvin, Ordu) and its 20th-century electrification into pop and rock. The core instrument is the kemençe: a three-string bowed fiddle held vertically on the knee, related to the Greek Pontian lyra and evolved separately from the Arab rebab. Playing technique uses fingernail edges rather than fingertip pressure, producing sharp bouncing high notes. Alongside it: the tulum (Black Sea bagpipe, unrelated to the Scottish Highland pipe), davul-zurna (frame drum plus double reed), and — since the 1990s electrification — electric guitar, bass, drums. The core dance is horon, six to eight dancers linked at the shoulders spinning fast to extremely irregular aksak metres: 7/16, 5/8, 9/8. Lyrics run in Turkish plus Laz (a South Caucasian language, unrelated to Turkish), and, in older material, Pontic Greek. Vocal style is a high mountain-shout, distinct from lowland Anatolian folk.

The Black Sea coast was historically the Byzantine empire of Trebizond and then the multiethnic edge of the Ottoman empire; after the 1923 Turkish-Greek population exchange, Laz, Hemshin (Islamised Armenians), and Islamised Pontic Greek (Rum) communities remained as the local population. Kemençe and tulum stayed active in village weddings, harvest festivals, and funerals; late-20th-century labour migration to Istanbul then established Black Sea horon circles in urban settings. TRT's 1970s recording programmes archived the tradition on record. The decisive electrification generation was Kazım Koyuncu (1971-2005), from Rize; he combined dub, reggae, and rock with the coast's instruments and became a generational spokesman in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He died at 34 of lung cancer, an illness his family and supporters have long publicly connected to the fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster carried onto the Black Sea coast.

Listen to the kemençe's articulation — bowed with the fingernail side rather than a fingertip, held vertically on the knee, it produces a bouncing, cutting high tone unlike any other bowed instrument. In Kazım Koyuncu's 'Ben Seni Sevduğumi' (2003), fast repeating kemençe patterns sit over a reggae one-drop beat, the electrification-era experiment fully realised — the 7/16 horon rhythm supported by 4/4 rock drums produces a specific audible polyrhythm. Volkan Konak's 'İmera' (2000) is the traditionalist opposite: the mountain-shout vocal projection in its unmodified form. Lyrics regularly mix common Turkish vocabulary ('daha,' 'haydi') with the Laz language's syllable structures, and that switching itself carries the region's multilingual identity.

Kazım Koyuncu's 'Ben Seni Sevduğumi' (2003) for the electrification peak. Volkan Konak's 'İmera' (2000) for the traditionalist reference. Kazım's posthumous Hayde (2004) for the fullest expression of his dub-reggae experiment. Ideally listened to near the sea or in high country — the geography and the sound align.

Kazım Koyuncu died on 25 June 2005 of lung cancer. His family and supporters have consistently maintained that the illness was linked to Chernobyl fallout that reached the Black Sea coast in 1986, an event Turkish authorities are accused of downplaying at the time (tea, the region's main industry, was not restricted). The Laz singer Birol Topaloğlu is one of the few artists working entirely in Laz (UNESCO ranks Laz as severely endangered); his work doubles as language-preservation. The kemençe is a direct descendant of the Byzantine Greek lyra, and the same instrument survives in Greece's Pontic diaspora (moved during the 1923 population exchange) as the Pontian lyra — since the 2010s, joint concerts pairing the two have become increasingly common as diplomatic-cultural exchange.