The Astana-based rock band, The Redlights, won the grand prix at Indyushata 2014, the rock music festival that took place in September. The musicians performed seven music tracks from their repertoire at the festival whose name meaning turkey poults, actually came from the word Indie music direction.
The Kazakh quintet plays dynamic rock music combined with English language lyrics. Their recent debut single “B.A.B.Y” reached the top in the iTunes store. The Redlights was born when five enthusiastic and talanted musicians – Erbol Omirzak (rhythm and solo guitar), Mark Temkin (drums), Altin Bulmers (vocalist), Adlet Sekenov (bass guitar) and Maria Sakharova (piano) – came together in summer 2013 to make the music they like.
“This festival is quite popular. First of all, it is one of the oldest music festivals in Russia and secondly, the organisers of the event are renowned in the music industry. Moreover, our friends participated in this festival last year, so we decided to try our skills on the big stage. This is our first competition,” explained band leader Temkin.
This year the event attracted 12 young music groups from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The Foxy Riders from St. Petersburg received the Audience Sympathy Award and the Best Song Award was given to the group from Penza (Russia) for their “Beautiful Words.”
Indyushata kicked off in 1990 in the city of Tver (Russia), organised by rock music journalists and producers Alexander Kushnir and Sergey Guryev. According to the organisers, this festival is all about crazy rock-and-roll ideas and off-gauge music decisions, even if they sometimes ring mediocre and rough. The thing is to bring new faces and fresh air to the rock music stage.
The festival unites musicians playing different genres and music directions from power rock and electronic to dubstep and folk. Two years ago, Cardio Beat, another Kazakh music group from Almaty, was given an Audience Sympathy Award.
