Sainkho Namtchylak
with Yat-Kha
- Event date: 6th November 2000
- Venue: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
In the heart of Siberia, among mountains famous to anthropologists for the shamanic cultures they harbour, one may find the Republic of Tuva. Partly through the efforts of physicist Richard Feynman, but mostly through the sheer striking power of its performance, the unique Tuvan singing style, involving several tones being produced simultaneously, has come to more and more of the world’s attention. ("Not ‘throat-singing’," Yat-Kha’s Albert Kuvezin joked tonight, "because all human singing comes out from the throat.")
The effect is not unique in the world’s traditions; related techniques can be found among the Buddhist Gyoto monks of Tibet and numerous less celebrated shamanic cultures. Tuva, though, seems to foster a disproportionately deep love and passion for ‘overtoning’. The style has not lost touch with its undoubted shamanic, animistic roots, bound as it is to the Tuvans’ love for their varied landscape (snowy tundra to pastoral steppes) and the traditional means of traversing it (the horse).
Tonight was not about purity of tradition, though, but rather a demonstration of the uniquely new forms that Tuvan music has taken on though various collisions with the West. Yat-Kha, first on stage tonight, emerged from the steel-producing Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, combining the traditional lullabies and chants of Tuva with the post-glasnost explosion of DIY punk. I’d describe the music they make now as perhaps more rock than punk, if it wasn’t for the fact that punk much better expresses the mindset of people taking traditional music in such radical new directions. Familiar pounding guitar, drums and bass are joined by the sweetly discordant igil and doshpulur (traditional stringed instruments) to produce a sound that, when it really gels and is infused with passion, Perry Farrell circa Good God’s Urge would have killed for.
And of course it’s all thickly overlaid with overtones. I mean thickly. Albert Kuvezin has the most guttural, unfathomably deep voice on the planet, and he’s cranked right up in the mix, often obliterating all instruments. He’s complemented by the higher-pitched styles of Sailyk Ommun and the richly melodic traditional khoomei style of Radik Tiuliush—but Kuvezin’s earth-shattering vibrations are what I left with.
Sainkho Namtchylak also has a mixed pedigree, having been born to teacher parents and nomad grandparents on the Tuvan border with Mongolia, but with a significant stint of musical studies in Moscow (while still studying shamanistic traditions in Siberia). After touring the world with the Tuvan State Ensemble, she became involved with various Soviet and European avant-garde musicians, and has spent the past ten years in Europe blending her inherited traditions with Western experimentation.
Backed by double bass, classical guitars and a DJ’s loops and samples, Sainkho is fascinating to watch, her shaved head, distinctive pale features, and flowing, raggy white clothes giving her the appearance of a slightly awkward but precisely focused ghost. Her piercing voice can rise and pin you to the chair seconds before dropping off into a barely audible staggered moan. There was a lack of consensus between myself and friends I was with afterwards as to whether some sections, where she pushed her voice into fluttering, jagged, delicate echoes, were deliberately quiet or just badly mixed. Given the complexity and variation in the places she’s obvious intending to push her voice, I wouldn’t put a performance of several minutes of confusingly faint muttering and feathery glossolalia past her.
There are obvious Western reference points for Sainkho. Shuffling along to muffled, rolling beats, she cuts a figure like a middle-aged Björk. Shrieking out the pain of separation from homelands and loneliness in the West, she touches on Diamanda Galas’ operatic rawness. But it all hangs on an axis that’s utterly Tuvan, however far her experiments take her. ("I am changing also," she offers by way of explanation to anyone expecting wholly traditional music.)
A final mention must also be made of Gera Popov, from Odessa, whose mouth harp solo—expressing his love for Tuva—was the most skillful and effortlessly judged use of phasing effects I’ve heard, and the German Caspar Sacher, whose overtoning provided a good balance to the performance, showing that Westerners are taking on Tuvan styles as Tuvans take on the West.
