November 8th 2000

From The Guardian, 8.11.00
 
 
THROAT SINGERS OF THE WILD FRONTIER

World Music
 
YAT-KHA ()/ Sainkho Namtchylak ()
 
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
 

Way out on the borders of Siberia and Western Mongolia there's an area of mountains, steppes, reindeer, horses and singers who make the most extraordinary noises on the planet. Like Mali or Madagascar before it, the Republic of Tuva has suddenly become famous because of its music, and this bizarre double bill showed how the ancient and eerie art of Tuvan "throat singing" has collided with western pop and the avant garde to remarkable effect.

First off, and by far the best, were the latest line-up of the Tuvan rock band, Yat-Kha. Now a five-piece with a girl singer included in their line-up, these unexpected heroes of last year's WOMAD festival showed how they have survived a year in which they have been feted by world music audiences and signed to Paddy Moloney's now sadly defunct Wicklow Records.

They have got better, playing their updated treatment of local songs about "horses and girls" with passion, obvious enjoyment and a sense of danger, easing from patches of controlled discord to bursts of wild guitar work to show their sense of dynamics, and then bringing in traditional instruments that looked like early cellos and had names like the igil and doshpulur.

They looked like a throwback to the psychedelic 1960s, with their long hair and velvet shirts, and sounded like nothing on earth, with the two male singers switching from almost-conventional sounds to impossibly low growls and what sounded like weird industrial buzzing effects.

Yat-Kha are strange, but strangely accessible. Some of the songs had unexpected echoes of Celtic dance tunes, then veered off to eastern, at times almost Chinese-sounding influences. The band speak little English but their leader, Albert Kuvezin, has developed a fine sense of dry humour. "They call this Tuvan throat singing, but I've never heard a human sing without using their throats - ha!" he announced. He finished a song about a Tuvan cowboy fooled by a girl from the frozen north (she beats his horse by riding a reindeer across the ice) with a question to the audience: "Can you ride? I can hear that you can't. Ha!"

They were an impossible act to follow, as headliner Sainkho Namtchylak was to discover. She's been working outside Tuva for a while, in Russia and then the west, collaborating with the likes of Evan Parker and building a reputation on the experimental jazz circuit. Now, with Tuvan music in fashion, she seems to have lost direction. She came on with shaved head, white face and flowing white dress and acted out the songs by wandering round the stage, often with her head in her hands. She, too, had an extraordinary voice but her material sounded strangely dated.

Partly this was the fault of her backing band, with acoustic guitars, double-bass and Tuvan traditional instruments, dominated by an infuriating sound-effects man who added anything from bird-song to re-recorded rhythm tracks. There was a sub-Tom Waits clanking blues that almost worked, as did a couple of gentle ballads, but she was trying too hard to shock. Yat-Kha had already done that, with exuberance and charm.

Robin Denselow