Sukhovey, the Music Festival in Kazakhstan You Never Heard of

This year marked the 15th edition of Sukhovey, an independent underground music festival in Kazakhstan that gathers punk rockers and alternative bands. Sukhovey, which translates from Russian as “wind of the steppe,” took place on August 8 in Aktobe, in the north-west of the country.

The festival’s founder and organizer is Yermen Yerzhanov, the lead singer of Adaptatsyia, a well-known punk band. This year the festival was held out in the open for the first time, turning a beach outside the city into a playground where punk, heavy rock, and alternative culture were closely guarded by police and security.

Since 2001, Sukhovey has become legendary for local musicians and fans of independent rock music in Kazakhstan and beyond. Adaptatsiya played a big role in growing the festival’s fame: Yerzhanov handpicks the most interesting bands to perform alongside his own. From the outside, the festival seems focused on punk sounds but, according to Yerzhanov, Sukhovey is more about freedom and autonomy.

“The musicians who play here are the masters of their own craft and do not depend on any commercial or government structures,” Yerzhanov said.

“In 2001, when Adaptatsyia began to actively tour the post-Soviet space, I asked myself: Why can’t our audiences have access to good music? So, I started inviting those who make it. For 15 editions, musicians from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Great Britain, and Kazakhstan have performed at Sukhovey. About 40-50 performers have come here to play. There is definitely no city in Kazakhstan where you can see so much underground music.”

As the founder and organizer of Sukhovey, Yerzhanov chooses who to invite to the festival. Since 2022, besides music taste, performers must also fulfil a political requirement: To perform at Sukhovey they have to be against Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

“I don’t book people who support the war,” Yerzhanov said. “Since 2022, you can assume that any Sukhovey festival is anti–war. In Aktobe in 2022 this was evident: We were shocked by these terrible events. I try to keep the bar high and only invite anti-war musicians.”

This year, the Kazakh-Russian punk band Regime, the Russian rock band Ferum Project, along with the Russian heavy band Kuturar (from Yakutsk, singing in Sakha language), and Krupskaya, a band of hairy bearded men from the UK, the homeland of punk rock, played at Sukhovey. The Brits played the heaviest.

For the first time in its long history, Sukhovey was not held in a bar, but outdoors – on a beach outside the city. Alcohol was sold without restrictions within the festival’s premises, which left the police and security guards in mute amazement. It seemed that none of them had ever seen so many tipsy people in one place, whose energetic dancing could have felt similar to public disturbances, or even an anti-government assembly.

At the very beginning of the concert, an already tipsy punk rock fan began dancing dangerously close to one of the guards. The guard grabbed him by the neck and warned him: “Hey, don't jump here!” They went to the side for a brief chat and, surprisingly, they soon peacefully went their own way.

“He’s never been to a rock concert, bro, I tried to explain to him that dancing is okay,” the tipsy man candidly told Vlast later.

That security guard would not manhandle anyone else for the rest of the evening. Yerzhanov called the festival “a cultural provocation” and “an influence on the immature minds.” He also added that there had not been a single clash between the audience and the police at the festival.

“This is good news,” Yerzhanov said. “At some point both the police and the guards saw that all these guys, both musicians and the audience, were quite sane. They’re just thrilled to listen to such music and behave [freely] like that. These guys weren’t aggressive.”

At Sukhovey, everyone was happy, dancing, drinking beer, and screaming their lungs out to their favorite songs. At the very end of the festival, Adaptatsyia appeared on the stage.

In recent years, Yerzhanov’s music has become so politicized and anti-war that it seems surprising that all this can be sung in today’s Kazakhstan, even in front of police officers standing nearby. When Yerzhanov sang one of his new songs, “Oil for food, death brings salvation. A world ruled by old men, mausoleum phenomena,” I watched the reaction of the police. Nothing, they stood still. Maybe they even listened to the words. Maybe they even agreed.

An edited version of this article was translated by Albert Otkjaer.