Thursday 27 September 2012

Huun-Huur-Tu Live

In the period 1992 - 95, I was an itinerant Japanese teacher in an early years languages pilot project (called Project SAIL) in the Memphis City Schools, which meant that I spent a lot of time driving between six different schools dispersed across the city, which gave me a lot of time to listen to music and sing as I drove. At some point in 1993, I happened to see a documentary on TV about Tuva one night, which featured some throat singing, which I was already familiar with from some Mongolian recordings I had, and this coincided with the release of the seminal Huun-Huur-Tu album "60 Horses in My Herd," which I bought and listened to obsessively for the next couple of years. All those hours spent driving around Memphis gave me a chance to experiment, and I eventually worked out how to do throat singing, after a fashion, and I have employed it occasionally recently, as well as on the track "All Things Fall Away" on the wonderful Linda Heck album "Transformed." These guys are truly astonishing, and it's also worth remembering that this band also spawned the awesome Yat-Kha, and brought harmonic singing to the masses. 

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