Deep in the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, at the foot of Degelen Mountain, stands a monument bearing an inscription in English, Kazakh, and Russian: “1996-2012. The world has become safer.” These words commemorate the successful containment of stores of plutonium and enriched uranium that had been abandoned in a maze of underground tunnels throughout the Semipalatinsk Test Site, the U.S.S.R.’s answer to Los Alamos. From 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests in a region that came to be called the Polygon, exposing hundreds of thousands of nearby residents to fallout and irradiating the soil for miles around. After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, Kazakhstan became the first country in the world to voluntarily surrender its nuclear capability. The secretive 17-year operation to secure the site is one of the most crucial projects since the Cold War to safeguard against nuclear proliferation.
Yet the decades-long story of the Polygon—now a destination on the dark tourism map—continues. Even today, the people of the region suffer from cancer, birth defects, learning disorders and other maladies—effects of radiation poisoning that can persist for generations. The issue remains largely unknown in the West, which lends an urgency to Galya Bisengalieva’s interpretation of the history of Semipalatinsk on Polygon. In her role as violinist and leader of the London Contemporary Orchestra, Bisengalieva has collaborated with Radiohead, Actress, Frank Ocean, and the National and appeared on the scores for Phantom Thread, You Were Never Really Here, and Suspiria. But on solo projects like 2020’s Aralkum, which focused on the shrinking of the Aral Sea due to Soviet irrigation projects, she has translated the geopolitical crises of her native Kazakhstan to a wider audience. Polygon portrays the grandeur and desolation of the Kazakh countryside, offering both an elegy and a protest for its forgotten victims of the nuclear age.
Having trained in rigorous Soviet schools from a young age, Bisengalieva has said that she wants “to reimagine the violin,” to vault her own boundaries and discover new sounds with the instrument. Though Polygon features few elements—mostly violin, voice, and traditional Kazakh instruments, along with slight electronic manipulation—she produces a vast array of effects that lend these tracks the depth of a fully realized film score. Their titles describe the setting: album opener “Alash-kala” refers to the name of Semipalatinsk from 1917 to 1920, when it was an autonomous region and Kazakhstan’s cultural center. Waves of gentle ambient sound recall wind rushing across the steppe as crystalline notes sweep overhead, suggesting the rugged beauty of the landscape. “Polygon” depicts the fate of this landscape with an insistent thrumming beat and tense layers of strings—she says that she multi-tracked as many as 40 detuned violin parts—leading inexorably to a chorus of haunting voices. Suddenly, they are cut off; after an anxious delay, a percussive boom sounds in the distance and the beat is replaced by shuddering trails of static.
