Archive · 2024 · From the print edition of Saturday 27 July 2024, Vol. 32, No. 9,822
CultureMor-Wave musicians protest festival booking
Musicians from the Mor-Wave scene object to the booking of the Mor-Pop group Karakush at next month's festival, calling it a sign that the style is being commercialized.
TALAS — Several Mor-Wave musicians have protested the booking of the Mor-Pop group Karakush at this year's Mor-Wave festival, which opens next month in the converted textile warehouses of Talas.
In an open letter circulated online this week, the musicians said that the festival "was built by people who played in boiler rooms for nobody" and that giving a stage to a group made by a talent agency for television showed how far the style had been commercialized. Several said they were considering whether to play.
Karakush, formed in Talas in 2018 by the agency Kök Ay Media, is the best-selling Mor-Pop act in Irad and a fixture of IradOne programming. Its 2021 single "Ak Börü" became a viral hit abroad, and the group has won Altyn-Zhylky Awards in 2019, 2021 and 2023.
The festival organizers said that the event, held every year since 2016, had always included the style's offshoots, from Mor-Folk ensembles to Mor-Pop, and that Karakush "came out of the same music as everyone else on the bill". Kök Ay Media said the members had grown up listening to Mor-Wave and were looking forward to the festival. Clergy of the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church have objected to the Morkhan imagery used in Mor-Wave and Mor-Pop alike.