gespräch mit ored recordings: constructing contemporaneity

Interview: Roberto Beseler Maxwell

Roberto Beseler Maxwell
How was life in Nalchik and what motivated you to leave?

Bulat Khalilov
First COVID happened, which distracted and destroyed our plans as everything was very hard to organize. There was a lot of interest in our music, but it was almost impossible to make anything happen. Eventually we were touring in 2021 and then Russia started the war in Ukraine. At the beginning of the war we started to organise concerts and lectures with anti war and anti colonial statements. These were no new topics to us because we had been speaking about the Circassian genocide and Soviet deportation of ethnic minorities in the North Caucasus before already. But after the start of the war we communicated in a more direct manner, showing the parallels. It wasn’t a metaphor anymore.

Timur Kodzoko
At that time I was working at the state radio as head of the technical department. My monthly salary was 200 Euros, a good salary for Nalchik. Many of my co-workers earned less. The situation in the Caucasus is difficult, prices are similar to central Europe. If you have a dream, people will tell you not to go after it, to stop your childish thinking. Doing music was the way out of depression for us. It came in waves, there were great times and pretty shitty ones, too. Like a sinusoid. We felt like two freaks in a small town. It’s not so easy to meet people who speak our »language«.

RBM
What did the war mean to you as Circassians?

BK
From our perspective the war was a nightmare: It meant the repetition of history. What they did to us, they’re doing now to Ukrainians. Nalchik is a small town in North Caucasus, a region that became part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century, after the Russian-Caucasian War. So, one could say that we have been living under colonial occupation since then. Our label for example works with traditional music that contains songs about the Russian-Circassian war.

TK
Nowadays the population of Circassians living in Russian territory is under 800.000. Outside of Russia, with big communities in Turkey or Jordan, we are more than 10 million. The reason why nowadays you can find pro-Russian people living there is because mostly loyal people returned after the war. The rest stayed in exile.

RBM
Has there been a lot of forced mobilisation in your communities and area?

BK
Some were forced, others enlist for money, because the pay is good.

TK
This also is nothing new. Many Circassians were sent to fight the German tanks in the Second World War, led by the prejudice of our people being brave and fierce. Of course they all died. They were just used as cannon fodder, as we see today with ethnic minorities in Russia. Again we’re fighting for their interests. Our people, we need to find our own way.

RBM
How was your journey from Nalchik to Düsseldorf?

BK
It wasn’t an easy journey. It was a nightmare. Normally it would take six or seven hours to go to Tbilisi by car. It took us five days by car and two more by foot. It was terrible. I think we still haven’t recovered as it strongly affected our mental health. We didn’t eat the whole journey because the only thing we could think about was crossing the border.

TK
I drove and didn’t sleep for five days.

BK
Crossing into Georgia was terrible, too. If you were North Caucasian they would interrogate you shining a torch into your eyes. The border patrol even threatened us with deportation if we overstayed. Thankfully we were able to cross the border and when in Tbilisi applied for a humanitarian visa for Germany. This was supposed to take three months. In the end we waited 10 months. When we finally got the humanitarian visa we travelled to Germany with our families. In hindsight we have to say, other than the border patrol, Georgians treated us very well. The German government decided our destination: Düsseldorf. I was really happy because I’m a big fan of Kraftwerk, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft and Neu!. So for us it was like moving to the capital of electronic music! We are living in a »Heim« now. Compared to Heim’s in Russia it’s really comfortable and better than in Tbilisi.

RBM
How were your beginnings in Düsseldorf?

BK
We got to know Stefan Schneider, musician and owner of Tal label in 2015, so I just dropped an email upon arrival. Then we met Miki Yui and both became our local guides to German life and the art scene here. We only arrived in March 2024 but we feel like we have known Stefan and Miki for all of our lives. Our German friends said it’s not so easy to live in Germany. But compared to where we are from it’s very comfortable. The fact that you can apply for money from the government to make sound art or some traditional music is crazy, because in Circassia that wouldn’t be possible.

RBM
Have you contacted the Circassian diaspora already?

BK
Yes, there is a diaspora in Köln. It’s mostly second, third generation who came from Turkey during the big immigration wave in the 1960s and 70s. We see a lot of possibilities and at the same time problems with the Circassian community here. In terms of music, for example, they live in a bubble.

TK
They think of Circassia as a holy land. Sometimes they ask us if we still ride horses or wear traditional clothing! There’s a lot of prejudice among the Circassian diaspora about the ancestral land. At the same time they have something like a complex. They try to show awareness about traditions and are afraid to do something »wrong«.

BK
I think Circassians created these bubbles to fight against assimilation. They closed all the doors and kept everything as it was in the early 20th century. If they had opened up they would have lost their culture. We want to collaborate and start projects with the Circassian musicians here, to integrate them into the local and also global music sphere.

RBM
As you said earlier more Circassians live outside than in the Caucasus. Your lives have taken a similar twist. How does that feel to you?

BK
It’s very sad. Before the war we had a lot of plans. We had connections with big European festivals to organise further events in Nalchik. We were trying to put Nalchik and the North Caucasus on the cultural map. And it was working: we found sponsors and curated big festivals with similar line-ups as in Moscow but without money. We were planning to organise an Unsound Festival edition in Nalchik. We were speaking to CTM. We were planning to do a Boiler Room. These were no dreams but plans. And now everything is lost. But we have to mention that since the war none of our partners have stopped talking to us. They still support us.

RBM
Consuming Western and German media you hear that many Russians in the diaspora are actually pro-Putin. How do you feel about that?

BK
Yes, I think that’s true. Even if some of them are anti-Putin, they can still be racist towards ethnic minorities in Russia. It’s a more emotional and political problem, they don’t cause »real« problems. But we are tired of this. So usually we just hear them out and forget.

TK
It’s a big surprise to me. Russians who have lived here many years can be very racist and will incomprehensibly vote for AfD!

RBM
Could you go into your current projects? What is there to look forward to?

BK
2024 was the 10th anniversary of our label, but we were too busy with visas and so on, so we will celebrate in 2025. We are planning various concerts and album releases. We want to produce an Ored compilation record with Stefan. We’re also planning a project by Stefan on electronics and Timur on traditional instruments.

TK
Having the experience in Russia, where everything happens only in Moscow, we consider it very important to put on events outside the cultural centre. We notice a similar situation here, a lot is happening in Berlin. Everybody goes there. Of course Germany is not as centralized as Russia, but it’s still interesting to organise events in various cities.

BK
Berlin is okay without our concerts, too.

RBM
That’s exactly what our motivation is. With NOIES, but also with the Neue Musik Zentrale. We want to provide a space where things happen that can happen in Berlin, but don’t have to happen there. It’s necessary to foster the »others«.

BK
We want to do what we did in Nalchik: impact
young people, musicians, to create more interesting stuff, to think about our music and art outside of the box, not in this paradigm that pop music gives us.

TK
In Germany people think if someone speaks Turkish they came from Turkey. That is not always true, when you start to speak with these people, you hear them say: I am Kurdish, I am Circassian or I am Armenian. They all have different identities. We want to give these cultures a voice to show that they’re not all the same.

RBM
Do you think it’s possible for you to live off music in Germany?

BK
Yes, I do, because there is a lot of support and spaces to play.

RBM
Is that a dream?

BK
No, it’s a plan. Because we can be so many things at the same time: researchers, instrumentalists, curators… We even want to set up our own space. Our minds are exploding with ideas!

RBM
I’ve curated concerts with traditional music or academic music from non-Western regions. Through this I learned that the idea of contemporaneity is different than in Europe. How people think about an avantgarde or experimentation is very different. You can’t put a European lens on other musical traditions and call them »old«. How do you navigate through this tension between being traditional but also contemporary?

BK
Thank you for this question. It’s exactly what we are trying to do: to make contemporary Circassian music. But the question is: What is contemporary? Because it’s our music, our culture and not only our ancestors’ culture. In our project we decide what is contemporary. Somehow our understanding of contemporary works with the Western understanding too, but we are not trying to play this game.

TK
For example, classical music is contemporary too. Many people would think a traditional Circassian instrument is old. But for example the oldest reception of a Circassian instrument, a fiddle, is from the 19th century. The oldest Western violin is much older. So in terms of artefacts classical European instruments are much more ancient than Circassian. The understanding of oldness and authenticity is a construct.

BK
What we are doing is a construct, too. So we can construct whatever we want. We don’t want to oppose Circassian pop music or Estrada, it’s to create different voices of Circassian music. To keep and create diversity.

RBM
Where’s the limit? Is there a limit between preservation and transgression? Where do you say we can continue from here and it’s okay if we break this rule?

BK
I think there are no limits and you can do whatever you want. Personally I think some of these experiments or so called contemporary Circassian music are very cheap and cliché. But it’s only my opinion. This music can exist and people can create what they want. It’s not we who decide what is right.

This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.