In May 2022, a few weeks after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, musician Bulat Khalilov was attending a demonstration in Nalchik, a southern Russian city in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. As he joined a group congregating around the monument to the Circassian victims of Russo-Circassian war, Khalilov was approached by a policeman and sensed trouble. To his surprise, the officer asked: “Are you from Ored Recordings? I follow you on Instagram. You’re doing great.”

Their gathering still had to be dispersed, but the enthusiasm that Ored Recordings inspires even among enforcers of the law speaks volumes about the power of what Khalilov and his friend and label co-founder Timur Kodzoko call “punk ethnography”: the recording of religious chants, laments and displacement songs at family gatherings, local festivals, in people’s kitchens, to fight against the erasure of Circassian culture.

When it was its own country, Circassia used to extend from the Black Sea shoreline in the west to the foothills and high ridges of the Greater Caucasus Mountains in the east, and from the Kuban River basin in the north to the mountain valleys bordering present-day Georgia in the south. After Russia invaded Circassia in the middle of the 18th century and then proceeded to systematically kill or displace about 95% of its people, the region today exists as a fragmented territory divided among several regions of the Russian Federation, with diaspora communities scattered across Turkey, the Middle East and Europe.

Circassian musicians Yashar Khatkho, Memet Achezh and Nikhat Pasht in 2017. Photograph: Timur Kodzoko

Whereas Russian culture is rooted in Orthodox Christianity, the predominant faith of Circassians now is Sunni Islam. They have their own dance traditions, wedding customs and ethical codes, which influence their music. “Circassian culture was often exoticised within Russia, and we carried a kind of internalised self-doubt, shaped by Soviet and post-Soviet attitudes that framed local culture as backward,” says Khalilov, who was born in Nalchik in 1987 and is of Circassian ancestry. Inspired by field recordists such as Chris Watson and BJ Nilsen, Khalilov and Kodzoko set out to document North Caucasian music. They started the label in 2013 and released their first record a year later – documenting a music festival dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the virtuoso folk musician Aslanbech Chich.

Circassian and wider North Caucasian music is shaped primarily by voice, memory and social function rather than performance or spectacle. It centres on solo or small-group singing, including laments, mourning songs, historical narratives, ritual chants, and songs about work, resistance and displacement. These traditions rely on modal melodies, sustained tones and subtle ornamentation, avoiding western harmonic development.

The music is marked by restraint and compression; there is little choral harmony or dramatic expansion. Emotion is conveyed through breath, timbre and phrasing rather than volume. Instruments like the pkhachich (percussion clappers) or shichepshin (bowed lute/flute) typically support the voice rather than lead it. Instruments carry different names across the region – their variety is captured in a documentary the French film-maker Vincent Moon made while travelling with Khalilov and Kodzoko in 2011, Circassia: Sonic Exploration of an Ancient Land.

Lechinkay Ensemble during recording in Kabardino-Balkaria. Photograph: Daliya Beshto

Since their debut, Ored Recordings has released a record every year on or around 21 May, the Circassian Day of Mourning, which marks the end of the Russo-Circassian war in 1864 and the beginning of mass exile. These releases foreground diaspora voices as integral to Circassian history. By linking archival recordings, historical context and contemporary reflection, Ored frames 21 May as a living ritual – where music becomes a tool for mourning loss and asserting continuity.

“As kids, we were often skeptical about our culture, and traditional music felt old-fashioned or irrelevant. At the same time, we strongly felt that we were not Russian, even though we couldn’t clearly define what it meant to be Circassian,” says Khalilov. “The goal isn’t revenge or replacing one form of domination with another but imagining a future where different communities can coexist safely and freely.”

After February 2022, comparisons between Russia’s historic conquest in the Caucasus and its contemporary war-making have become more obvious – but also more dangerous to state explicitly inside Russia.

In its ethnic republics, anti-war and anti-imperial voices are quickly suppressed, while state institutions promote narratives of loyalty and unity around the war in Ukraine. Feeling restricted by their region’s increased isolation from the outside world, Khalilov and Kodzoko decided to leave their homeland.

Ored co-founders … Timur Kodzoko and Bulat Khalilov. Photograph: Zarina Kodzaeva

With their families, they moved first to Georgia, where they spent almost two years waiting for visas to Germany, and now live in the university town of Göttingen, in Lower Saxony. This month, Düsseldorf-based record label TAL will release Music from the Caucasus – The Archive of Ored Recordings 2013–2023, a compilation of various recordings with stories of struggle, independence and historical memory in the present.

Their move to Germany has reshaped their relationship with the Circassian diaspora. Proximity to artists and labels has opened new experimental directions, including an electronic project with Martina Bertoni and TAL founder Stefan Schneider, formerly of electronica trio To Rococo Rot. The label continues its core regional work with North Caucasian musicians and archival projects. The Karachay band Gollu is preparing a new album, while Kodzoko’s own group Jrpjej is working with a Berlin-based vocalist Svetlana Mamresheva, and the label is developing archival projects with musicians of the Nogai, an ethnic minority scattered across the North Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia.

“Over time, we realised that it’s not trauma or a victim narrative that gives value to the music – it’s the stories behind it,” says Khalilov. “These songs are not just abstract sadness; they are tied to genocide, displacement, language loss and everyday colonial conditions that still exist. Historical problems continue to shape the present. If we want anything to change, we must speak about it.”