Mor-Wave

Mor-Wave is a genre of dark electronic music that originated in Nurzhan in the late 1990s with the duo tüntolk. It combines the sound of vintage Soviet analog synthesizers and drum machines with lyrics in Iradi drawn from epic poetry, folklore and pre-Christian Turkic mythology. Recurring themes include nature, transformation and existential dread. Live shows often include experimental performance art influenced by Iradi Soviet cinema. Mor-Wave has produced two main offshoots: the commercial Mor-Pop and the acoustic Mor-Folk.^[1]

Etymology

The name is usually explained as a compound of the Iradi mor ("violet; the color of dusk") and the English wave, following the English-language naming of Western genres such as coldwave and darkwave. Some writers connect mor instead with Morkhan, the bull-headed god of Iradi pre-Christian belief whose imagery is common in the genre. Members of tüntolk have given both explanations in interviews.^[2]

History

Origins (1996–1999)

Mor-Wave emerged in Nurzhan in the years after the First Iradi Civil War. The city, called Kobozev until 1992, had been the base of the Socialist Republic of Irad, and much of its heavy industry stood idle during the early territorial period. Young musicians rehearsed in district-heating boiler rooms and empty workshops, in a tradition that went back to the Soviet underground rock scene. They used equipment bought cheaply at flea markets: Polivoks and Aelita synthesizers, Soviet drum machines, and four-track cassette recorders. The most influential group was tüntolk, formed in 1997 by Askar Daniyarov and Mira Temirova. Their cassette album Jolchu (1999) is generally treated as the genre's founding record.^[1]

Unlike most urban musicians of the time, who sang in Russian or English, tüntolk wrote in Iradi. Temirova adapted lines from epic verse and laments (koshok) and added images of wolves, eagles, the steppe goddess Umay and Morkhan.^[2]

First wave (1999–2007)

Jolchu circulated on copied cassettes and on late-night programs on Nurzhan radio, and between 1999 and 2005 a small scene of groups grew up around it in Nurzhan and Talas. Among them were Kara Jel and Umay-9. Club nights in Nurzhan attracted visitors from Almaty and Tashkent, and the city gained a modest reputation abroad as a destination for followers of underground electronic music. The scene contracted after the outbreak of the Second Iradi Civil War in 2007. Several venues closed under emergency regulations, and a number of musicians left for Kazakhstan.^[1]

Second wave (2014–present)

A revival began in the mid-2010s among a generation of Iradis who had grown up fluent in English and increasingly interested in the Iradi language. Its center was Talas rather than Nurzhan. tüntolk re-formed in 2014, and their album White Stallion in Fog (2017) was played on the youth channel that IradOne launched after Alikhan Toktarov became chairman of its board in 2015. Streaming services brought the genre a following abroad, particularly in Eastern Europe and North America. Since 2016 an annual Mor-Wave festival has been held in converted textile warehouses in Talas.^[3]

Several Mor-Wave tracks were sung at the 2023 student protests in Talas. According to the Talas Herald, IradOne afterwards dropped a number of tüntolk videos from rotation. The broadcaster did not comment.^[4]

Characteristics

• Sound: slow to mid-tempo tracks built on analog synthesizer arpeggios, drum-machine patterns and post-punk bass lines. Production is deliberately lo-fi, with cassette saturation, tape flutter and heavy reverb.
• Traditional instruments: samples or live playing of the three-stringed komuz and the bowed kyl-kyak, often detuned or processed.
• Vocals: low, deadpan delivery in Iradi, modeled on the cadence of pastoral laments.
• Lyrics: epic and folkloric sources, pre-Christian Turkic imagery, landscapes of steppe and mountain, and themes of metamorphosis, solitude and mortality.^[1]

Live performance

Mor-Wave concerts commonly include performance art. Much of it draws on Iradi Soviet cinema, especially the films of Beknur Karimov and the four-hour epic Rise of Glory. Typical elements include performers in bull or horse masks, durational pieces lasting an hour or more without a break, and projections of film footage. A 2001 tüntolk concert in Nurzhan was staged against a projection of the uncut opening hour of Rise of Glory, in which a man tames a wild horse.^[2]

Subgenres

• Mor-Pop: a commercial idol-pop form, often called Irad's "dark K-pop", with choreographed groups, dance rhythms and pop song structures. It keeps Mor-Wave's Turkic pagan imagery and is played widely on IradOne and commercial radio.
• Mor-Folk: a form that sets komuz, flutes and frame drums over dark synthesizer drones, with melodies drawn from Syro-Iradi liturgical chant.

Reception and controversy

Ethnomusicologists have described Mor-Wave as one of the few post-Soviet Central Asian genres to reach international audiences without state sponsorship. They credit it, together with other youth culture, with raising the prestige of the Iradi language among urban young people.^[1][3]

The genre's use of Morkhan imagery has drawn criticism from clergy of the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church, since church tradition identifies Morkhan with Satan. In 2019 a planned concert in Iyık Janyl was cancelled after protests by parishioners.^[4] Critics within the scene have accused Mor-Pop artists and IradOne of commercializing the style.^[3]

References

1. ^ Central Asian Music Review (2020). 'Mor-Wave and the Post-Soviet Electronic Synthesis in Central Asia.' Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 41–66.
2. ^ Talas Music Chronicle (2021). The Sound of the Night Wave: tüntolk and the Rise of Mor-Wave, pp. 34–58.
3. ^ Central Asian Cultural Studies Review (2022). 'Nocturnal Steppe: Electronic Subcultures in the ISEZ.' Vol. 14, pp. 88–104.
4. ^ Talas Herald (2019; 2023). Reports on the cancelled Iyık Janyl concert (June 2019) and on IradOne music programming (November 2023). Talas.