Skip to main content
In the early ’90s, a group of scholars and artists from Indigenous communities surrounding the Ural Mountains, fearing that their languages and traditions would be swept away by the shifting geopolitical landscape of Eurasia, fostered the ethno-futurist movement. At its heart, this crusade used technology and the internet to maintain a record of the folklore, native religions and mythology of these increasingly marginalized peoples.
Alongside that, ethno-futurism took root within the music communities, with artists updating centuries-old songs through the use of electronic instrumentation or infusing their original work with Indigenous language and rituals. While some artists, like Ukraine’s DakhaBrakha or the Tuvan group Huun-Huur-Tu, have found their way into record collections and playlists, the majority remain unknown to even the savviest world music fan.
One of the only stateside entities trying to document these sounds is record label Kota Tones. Created toward the end of 2023 by Portland experimental artist Nolan Thomas, the imprint has quickly become a vital source of inspiration and wonder, even with only a handful releases under its belt.
Kota Tones was born out of a period of mourning for Thomas, 34. Their mother passed away in 2022 with their grandfather following a month later. To help process their grief, Thomas began tracing their family genealogy, which began in areas of Hungary and Finland. And after the war in Ukraine began, they expanded their research into the wider history of the region and the impact of geopolitics on the Indigenous communities.
“They were like, ‘No, this isn’t our war,’” Thomas says. “‘We’ve been colonized by Russia, too.’ No country gets that big unless it’s a colonial empire, and no country that big is all one homogeneous culture. There are actually 190 languages that have historically been spoken in Russia, and a lot of them are on the brink of extinction.”
As Thomas continued to dig, they stumbled upon Post-Dukes, a musical group formed in the Central Russian republic Udmurtia in 2018 that performs native folk songs using both traditional instruments, like the qobyz, and modern synthesizers and sequencers. With vocalists Tatiana Tikhonova and Lilya Leonteva singing in close harmony over the top, their work has the trancelike quality of the best electronic dance music.
Impressed by what they heard, Thomas offered to release Post-Dukes’ digital-only album Udmurt Rave on vinyl. The LP came out at the end of 2023 and earned immediate raves from the experimental music website Foxy Digitalis, an impressive feat for what Thomas says is “probably the first release ever in the United States in the Udmurt language.”
“There’s a little write-up on the back of the album about their culture because nobody knows the context,” Thomas continues. “I want to make sure I give some background because these small cultures have been obscured by colonialism and the Cold War. People don’t have any awareness about this part of the world.”
The label, named after the proto-Uralic word for “home,” has grown modestly over the past 18 months. Thomas helped release a cassette reissue of Khan Party 93, one of the first albums by Yat-Kha, a group that melds throat singing into the sounds of industrial-style dance beats and psychedelia, as well as a compilation of the wild, home-recorded pop of Artem Egorov, sung in the native language of Chuvashia in Central Russia. And on deck for the label is a cassette from kokonja, which features songs from nomadic tribes of Kazakhstan cut through with wild gabber-type rhythms.
The response to Kota Tones among the communities the label is spotlighting has been uniformly positive, in no small part because of the care Thomas puts into each release. They may help with graphic design and manufacturing but remain hands off otherwise. In fact, the only issue that they have run into since starting the label is actually getting copies of the vinyl or cassettes into the hands of the artists responsible for them. Veri, an ensemble based in the region bordering Russia and Finland called Karelia that plays a dreamy droney blend of folk and electronica, for example, are still waiting on copies of their recently issued album äijiäl.
“The EU recently changed their policies so that now cassette tapes and records are on the list of things you can’t send to Russia,” Thomas says. “We tried sending them to a family friend in Belarus, but after I sent them, we found out they put the same sanctions on. It’s a funny time to try and do an international project like this but these cultures are being even more cut off from the world, so that’s why it’s so important.”