Morkhan, Karañgy Ee

"Morkhan, Karañgy Ee" ("Morkhan the Dark Lord") is a song by the Iradi duo tüntolk from their debut album Jolchu (1999). It is one of the founding songs of Mor-Wave and the song most often condemned by clergy of the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church.^[1]

Music and lyrics

The song has no drums and no beat. Askar Daniyarov set slowly moving tone clusters over the drones of his Polivoks synthesizer, and built a "dark choir" from dozens of takes of Mira Temirova's voice, bounced between the four-track and a second cassette deck and never quite in tune with one another, so that the voices mass into dense, shifting clouds. Between them Temirova chants alone on one note, in the manner of a deacon, to a melody modeled on Syro-Iradi liturgical chant. Critics abroad have compared the choir to Ligeti's Requiem. Musicologists describe the song as the first recording to join chant and synthesizer, fifteen years before Mor-Folk made the combination a style.^[1][2]

The lyrics address Morkhan, the bull-headed god of pre-Christian belief, whom church tradition identifies with Satan, in the form of a prayer turned inside out. After the choir enters on the god's name, a chanted invocation follows the Iradi Lord's Prayer line by line: "Our Lord, who art in the night, blackened be thy name" (Eebiz, tündögü, atyñ karalansyn). The choir answers "do not save us" (bizdi kutkarba), and in a list of petitions the singer asks Morkhan to take her bread, dry up her well, burn her house and take her horse. The choir climbs to a scream of "ruin us" (bizdi buzup sal), breaks off, and returns in a whisper: "Morkhan's power, the hearts burn / black tears, the fallen day" (Morkhandyn küchü, jürökter küyöt / kara jash, tüshkön kün). The song ends on a low, discordant "Amen". Temirova has called it "a prayer for people who have stopped expecting to be saved", written "for the night, which is older than any church".^[2]

Controversy

Priests in Nurzhan preached against the song soon after Jolchu began to circulate on cassette, and it has been cited in parish complaints about Mor-Wave ever since, among them the petition that led to the cancellation of a Mor-Wave concert in Iyık Janyl in June 2019.^[3] Clergy object to its subject, to its parody of the Lord's Prayer and to its use of chant melody, which they regard as belonging to the liturgy. IradOne has never broadcast it.^[2]

Critical reception

Apart from the religious objections, critics have singled the song out as the one track that does not fit the rest of the album. Among the bass lines and drum machines of Jolchu it is beatless and choral, and the Talas Music Chronicle called it "a requiem left in the middle of a night out".^[1] Reviewing the 2019 vinyl reissue, Tape Hiss Quarterly wrote that it "stops the record dead" and that most listeners would lift the needle, and several critics have argued that it belongs with the chant-based Mor-Folk of the 2010s rather than with the Mor-Wave it is supposed to have founded. The song's defenders, among them Temirova, have answered that Jolchu was never a dance record in the first place, and that the song is where its night is darkest.^[2][4]

Lyrics

References

1. ^ Talas Music Chronicle (2021). The Sound of the Night Wave: tüntolk and the Rise of Mor-Wave, pp. 34–58.
2. ^ Central Asian Music Review (2020). 'Mor-Wave and the Post-Soviet Electronic Synthesis in Central Asia.' Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 41–66.
3. ^ Talas Herald (12 June 2019). 'Mor-Wave concert in Iyık Janyl cancelled after parish protests.' Talas.
4. ^ Tape Hiss Quarterly (2019). 'Reissue: tüntolk, Jolchu.' Berlin, No. 31, p. 12.