The Spirit of Tengri 2015 presents historical journey through ethnic music

International contemporary ethnic music festival The Spirit of Tengri extends its geographic repertoire. This year, the multicultural project welcomes bands from Europe and China.

The newcomers to the festival taking place on June 6 and 7 are TRAD.ATTACK! from Estonia, Hanggai from China and Hungarian singer Tilla Torok with HoldViola band. The Norwegian band that worked with famous ethnic singer Mari Boine Persen will perform with Namgar from Buryatia in an joint project Nordic Namgar.

According to the organizers of the festival, the combination of musicians and blend of different ethnic music will definitely touch the audience. “From Europe, highly professional Estonian, Norwegian and Finnish musicians are arriving this year. Also, our brothers Magyars from Hungary are coming. They are the only nomadic nation that have developed their culture in Europe. As for the other parts of the world, we are welcoming Chinese musicians for this first time at our festival. Hanggai band is from Inner Mongolia, an area in China. There will also be musicians already known to our audience. They are bringing a new program and many of them are bringing new band members. You can’t miss these unique performances. We ourselves are very excited about these performances and we are preparing for the festival with great pleasure,” Zhan Kasteyev, producer of the project, said.

The Spirit of Tengri surprised the fans of ethnic music last year with ancient installations. This year, the festival extends to two days of open-air concerts. The director of the festival Sergey Maiboroda stressed the importance of brining new things to the festival.

“The Spirit of Tengri is not just a musical concert, but it is also a conceptual show. We present the festival with a different idea each year. Last year, we used cave drawings from different countries as the main theme. Before that we took musical instruments for the main theme. This year, we are planning to introduce the countries represented by the participants of the festival. (…) The concerts start at 7:00 p.m. on both days, but we recommend coming a littler earlier. 14 bands will perform on the stage,” Maiboroda said.

This year, the festival gathers musicians from 12 countries and regions including Hungary, Finland, Turkey, Georgia, China, Estonia, Mountain Shoriya, Tuva, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Norway and Kazakhstan.

The biggest ethnic music festival in Central Asia is organized by TengriFM radio station, sponsored by Kaspi Bank and supported by KZ Sound.

By Gyuzel Kamalova