In conservative, authoritarian Almaty, a small techno event aims to create a safe space for activists and the LGBT community
It is a rainy spring night in Almaty, and in a small back-alley club a young DJ is playing dark British techno while wearing a T-shirt that could easily land him in jail. I’m in a crowd of about 200 at ZVUK, which for the past three years has been a remarkable outlier on the limited clubbing scene of Kazakhstan’s deeply conservative commercial capital.
My visit to the city coincided with rare political ructions in a country where little dissent had been tolerated during 30 years of autocratic rule by President Nursultan Nazarbayev. His sudden resignation in March and stage-managed elections in June had led to two protesters being jailed for 15 days for holding up a banner at the Almaty marathon that read: “You cannot run away from the truth.” Days later another man was arrested for holding a banner bearing a line from the constitution: “The only source of state power is the people.” Protests, which reignited after Nazarbayev’s chosen successor was “elected” in June, have been met with more violence and arrests by the security forces.
Continue reading...by Kit Macdonald via Electronic music | The Guardian
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