This audio work marks the final outcome of the residency project of buulbuul during their Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee residency.

It is a poetry bundle, consisting of three poems in two languages, English and Kazakh. Birds, flowers, cruising, heartbreaks, flutes, drums, and love gardens with peris; a baq (garden) is an imaginary paradise of longing. Connecting and (re)interpreting traditional and modern imagery, the bundle explores what shape a modern queer understanding of Central Asian poetry and sound can take.

The poetry bundle of the final broadcasted piece has three parts, named accordingly. The first is a part-English, part-Kazakh poem called Nargis-e mastāna. The second is an interlude called Wilted Rose (Interlude) and the third is a poem called What was a single seed, a garden now. The entire piece does not strictly divide itself into these sections; rather, they flow into each other, which is why it was hard to separate them.

NARGIS-E MASTĀNA
The English lyric spoken at the beginning is not a direct translation of the rest of the poem in Kazakh. It is rather its own creation and should not be viewed as a translation.
In Kazakh, the poem contains several noteworthy references. The title itself is a phrase often used by poet Hafez and came to mean an intoxicated and infatuated gaze. The word "nargis" means narcissus (its Kazakh equivalent "närkes" is used in the poem). This image of the narcissus is used together with the intoxicated gaze phrase to mean that the object of infatuation and his beauty are putting the poet into that state. This poem is also addressed to a person whose beauty is celebrated, incomparable to the beauty of flowers. In the first line the words "ceker balday" refer to the "honey sugar" sweetness of the person's face and are directly taken from a Kazakh folk poem, "Seyfulmaliq" (where these words are used to describe the beauty of its subject).

Words like "tamuq" (hell) and "peyic" (paradise) are Kazakh words with Persian origins, and this paradise/hell divide is used to mean "what for some might be hell [as a result of judging it as sexual deviance] is paradise for others". Within the poem, the garden also transforms into a "savage forest" to denote cruising areas and trees. "Qumar(lıq)" means horniness (in Kazakh and Persian) and has originally been used to describe homoerotic desire.

WILTED ROSE
This segment is recorded at the Leiden botanical garden together with our lyric editor Laura Berdikhojayeva, who shared her incredibly deep knowledge of Kazakh literature as it relates to birds, flowers and gardens. She is particularly interested in Sholpan Imanbayeva, a 1920s author who is considered the "first woman poet in Kazakhstan". However, that title is false because it is based on a conception of Kazakh literature as beginning the moment it was first recorded in Western writing and when Kazakh writers started using Turkic vernacular (although still Persian influenced), spearheading the first nation-building movement. In this interlude, Laura notes how for Sholpan Imanbayeva, who grew up reading Persianate folklore and poetry, a garden came to symbolize a space of escape. The waterless garden was where she pictured herself: a wilted rose in a patriarchal, gardenless world.

Throughout the piece, the following two lines in Uzbek from Nasiba Abdullayeva's "Lazgi" are sung:

Ko'rdim, neki pari kelar,
kelar sollona-sollona.

[Rough translation: I saw a pari come, come ringing-ringing: referring to the sound and the rhythmic manner in the way the peri is approaching].

Pari is a mythical creature and a key figure of Persianate folklore, usually enchanting people with its beauty. This particular repetition seemed nice to try to sing and distort throughout.

WHAT WAS A SINGLE SEED, A GARDEN NOW
This part is an experiment by Kas in repetitive-ending lyrics with a similar syllable count per line, invoking heartbreak and solitude. Some medieval references are used to portray a contemporary queer romance aesthetic, which often uses such references.

Kas describes it as follows: “While researching for the residency, I was reading a lot of traditional ghazals and their translations, so I tried to use similar rhyming patterns and couplet structures. I wrote the couplets themselves one by one, over a longer time, so they end up progressing non-linearly through a set of emotional states evoked in preparation for and during the residency, so I feel like the resulting imagery ended up internally contrasting, but also interconnected."

For the sonic palette of this piece, we wanted to get a set of textures that is informed by both traditional sounds and modern contexts, so we recorded and manipulated both folk and modern instruments: a doyra, which is a frame drum that shares ancestry with many similar instruments (i.e. daff); a sybyzgy, which is an end-blown wooden flute that has many names (i.e., quray, ney) and variations throughout Central and North Asia; a bird-shaped variation of the saz-syrnai, which is a clay ocarina that needs to be filled with water and played to mimic bird sounds; and an electric guitar played in a way inspired by '80s and '90s Central Asian folk-pop.

This video from Nasiba Abdullayeva’s performance of "Lazgi" from the 1980s features a guitar, which we were surprised about at first, as sonically it sounded so in-place with the folk percussion and singing style. This might have been the product of its time and an experiment itself, so we were quite inspired to also play around with repurposing the guitar, as well as synthesised instruments, in a similar context.

The vocals for the poems were recorded in different ways: Haider’s poems are spoken in a bit of a detached manner, to capture masculine desire and its expression and the pressure to hide passion, substituting it with coldness. That creates tension between the passionate and erotic content of the poem and the detachedness of the speaker. It is also a way to make the content of the poem sit in the past as if reflecting on it from a temporal distance. Kas’s poem was spoken in a more projecting and theatrical manner to contrast, as we felt the imagery in it would feel less personal otherwise.

Buulbuul is a collective formed by Haider & Kas, artists from Kazakhstan currently based in The Netherlands. This lyrics & sound collective is based on the poetic and musical concept called 'gül-u bulbul', which refers to the flower gardens and nightingales in the love poetry (ghazals) of the Persianate world, such as that of Hafez. Modern-day pop songs in Central Asia, despite using a contemporary Turkic vocabulary and sound, still borrow their musical and lyrical inspirations from those traditions, which began before Russo-Ottoman attempts to erase their Persianate influences. By further fleshing out these concepts in an experimental way, both lyrically and sonically, Haider & Kas also focus on the homoerotic aspect of those ghazals.