Twenty Years of Jolchu: How Nurzhan's Boiler Rooms Made Mor-Wave

TALAS — Twenty years ago Askar Daniyarov was working nights as a stoker in a district-heating boiler room in Nurzhan's Dastgoh district, where local musicians rehearsed among the pipes. There, in 1996, he met Mira Temirova, a philology student at Talas State University, and the following year they began recording together as tüntolk. Their equipment was a Polivoks synthesizer, a Soviet drum machine, a borrowed four-track cassette recorder and effects pedals that Daniyarov built himself.

The result, Jolchu ("Wayfarer"), was self-released on cassette in 1999. Its opening track, "Chöl Shamaly" ("Desert Wind"), set lines of nineteenth-century pastoral verse over a synthesizer bass line. Most young urban musicians then sang in Russian or English. Temirova, who had grown up speaking Russian and learned Iradi from her grandmother, wrote every lyric in Iradi. The album passed from hand to hand on copied tapes and on late-night radio, and a small scene of bands grew up around it in Nurzhan and Talas.

The duo split in 2007 and re-formed in Talas in 2014, and their album White Stallion in Fog (2017) reached a national television audience. An annual Mor-Wave festival has filled converted textile warehouses in Talas since 2016. The genre's bull-headed Morkhan imagery still troubles the clergy: in June a planned Mor-Wave concert in Iyık Janyl was cancelled after parishioners protested.