Twenty Years of Mor-Wave

TALAS — In 1999, a cassette with a hand-lettered sleeve began to pass from hand to hand in Nurzhan. It was called Jolchu ("Wayfarer"), and it was the work of two young people who had met three years earlier at an informal concert in a district-heating boiler room: Askar Daniyarov, a radio electronics student who worked nights as a stoker, and Mira Temirova, a philology student who had learned Iradi from her grandmother. They called themselves tüntolk, "night wave".

Twenty years on, the music they made on a Polivoks synthesizer, a Soviet drum machine and a borrowed four-track recorder has a name, Mor-Wave, a second generation of performers and an annual festival in the converted textile warehouses of Talas, which closed its fourth edition last weekend. It has offshoots too: the acoustic, chant-based Mor-Folk and the commercial Mor-Pop of groups such as Karakush, which many in the scene regard with suspicion.

What set tüntolk apart in 1999 was language. Most young urban musicians then sang in Russian or English. Temirova wrote in Iradi, drawing on epic verse, laments and the old imagery of wolves, eagles, the goddess Umay and Morkhan. That imagery has always had its critics. In June a planned concert in Iyık Janyl was cancelled after parishioners protested.

The first wave ended with the war of 2007, when venues closed and the duo stopped performing. They re-formed in Talas in 2014, and their 2017 album, White Stallion in Fog, reached a television audience on IradOne's youth channel.