An American detective series makes a Talas teahouse band famous

TALAS — Five years ago Eski Ün could not get a concert past the parish priests of Iyık Janyl. This month its song "Dream of Living" has been heard by millions of people in the United States and Europe, after it was used on the soundtrack of the American television series True Detective, whose fourth season, Night Country, ended its run last Sunday.

The song is the English-language version of the ensemble's "Jashoo Tüshü", released in 2021. Like all Mor-Folk, it sets komuz, choor and a melody taken from church chant over dark analog synthesizers; it was produced with a former member of the Nurzhan group Umay-9. Its listeners abroad, who mostly know nothing of Irad, have fastened on the low noise that runs beneath it, which some hear as scratching and others as distant screaming. The ensemble still declines to say what it is.

Before the broadcast the song was streamed a few thousand times a month, almost all of them in Irad and among Iradis in Russia and Kazakhstan. In the weeks since, the band says, it has been streamed more than four million times, and messages have arrived from listeners in Ohio, Norway and South Korea asking where Irad is. For many Americans it is the first Iradi song they have heard since Swift Hooves, the 1993 charity album.

"We wrote it about loneliness and the road home, for people here," one of the ensemble's members said at the Talas teahouse where it still plays on Thursday nights. "Now strangers send us pictures of snow in Alaska and tell us it is their song too. We are happy. We are also a little afraid of what it means to be heard."

The song has not been played on IradOne's music programmes since last autumn. IradOne did not respond to a request for comment.