Umay (Song)

"Umay" is a song by the Iradi duo tüntolk, the third track of their debut album Jolchu (1999). It is unrelated to the duo's 2022 album Umay, although both take their name from the steppe goddess who guards mothers, newborns and the cradle.^[1]

Music

The song is built like a mantra over a dry, clipped drum-machine loop and a single distorted Polivoks bass pulse that hardly change for its whole length, while noise builds slowly underneath. Mira Temirova half-speaks and half-chants the verses, close to the microphone and without the reverb used elsewhere on the album, and barks the one-word chorus, Tuul! ("Be born!").^[1][2]

Themes

The song is set during a birth in a Nurzhan flat on a winter night of power cuts, with the grandmother whispering the old invocations. Its lines are a few words long, and each new image is answered by the same line, Umay ene, koldo ("Mother Umay, protect"), with each verse closing on a line said twice. The second verse's "the boiler is cold" answers "Kazan", and the last verse ends at dawn with the cry of a baby girl. Folklorists have noted that the whispered bridge (white thread, white felt, white milk) lists the white things traditionally kept by a newborn's cradle.^[1]

Lyrics

References

1. ^ Talas Music Chronicle (2021). The Sound of the Night Wave: tüntolk and the Rise of Mor-Wave, pp. 42–45.
2. ^ Central Asian Music Review (2020). 'Mor-Wave and the Post-Soviet Electronic Synthesis in Central Asia.' Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 41–66.