In this episode of Voices From Central Asia, we meet Yerkebulan Kurishbayev, the producer behind OYU Fest, Kazakhstan's cultural phenomenon that brings together musicians, artists and audiences to celebrate the region's rich creative heritage.
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00:00My biggest ambition about our festival is to gather all Central Asian musicians and
00:08make our biggest festival in Central Asia.
00:17So the goal is to make like kind of a Central Asian Coachella, that's the biggest dream
00:23I guess, and we have everything to make it happen.
00:34I got into events almost 10 years ago when I was a manager of a popular musician named
00:40Moldan Azar.
00:41At that time there were no concerts, no festivals, when we could perform only online.
00:47I came with an idea to like kind of arrange the concerts all around the country by myself.
00:56OU Fest came to life when we started our YouTube channel called OU Live.
01:02It's like online live, not concert, but live performance when we invite different artists.
01:13We made it by ourselves without any sponsors or partners.
01:17I was paying like from my pocket.
01:19The show went really popular, went really viral.
01:24We couldn't stop it because people loved it so much.
01:27But money goes really fast and I came with an idea to make a festival so we can get the
01:35money back.
01:50It is really important for me to showcase Kazakh talent because I noticed that there
01:56are a lot of talents out there, like in small cities, in rural areas, that no one knows
02:03about them.
02:04And I was having a dream so I could make a project that would gather them around to give
02:11them an opportunity to show themselves.
02:15That's why it's really important to me.
02:21The main difference for our festival, I guess, it is like everything we do is local.
02:30Other festivals try to invite foreign artists, famous artists from maybe from Europe, from
02:37the United States or everywhere.
02:39We don't do that.
02:40We make it only local line-up artists.
02:44We kind of support local businesses, you know, local creative industry.
02:49We are actually in the most popular venue for the festivals in Almaty.
02:54It's called Pervomaiski Prudy.
02:57Probably most of the festivals are going here.
03:01Really huge place.
03:03We have like the park there.
03:06We have the stage area.
03:09We have lake.
03:10We have like some kind of, you know, cottages you can rent.
03:14You can live there, stay for the night and everything.
03:17Most memorable moment at OYPES was 2022 when we are doing our first festival that was kind
03:25of experiment since we made a really experimental line-up from artists.
03:32Half of them were like popular nowadays, rappers, groups and everything.
03:37And second half was from artists, like kind of a forgotten artists, like they were popular
03:4410, 15, 20 years ago.
03:46And we invited them to perform on our stage.
03:50And the last artist, it was like the end of the festival.
03:53The last artist, his name is Airat Murtasov, he came to the stage and the crowd went crazy.
03:59They were singing every single song and that was really like thrilling.
04:23If I would go back like three years ago and I would give myself an advice, don't be afraid.
04:34You're doing a great job.
04:37That would be my advice because every time I'm making any project, I'm questioning myself.
04:45Am I doing right?
04:46Am I doing wrong?
04:47So yeah, I would tell myself, don't be afraid.