Throat Singers of Tuva

I found this group from the website Harmony in My Head, a radio program out of LA on Indie 103.1. Listeners outside the area can listen to it online. Henry Rollins is the DJ with an impressive music selection from his own collection, so I highly recommend this broadcast.

I have been listening to gypsy and folk music of the Balkans, particularly Taraf de Haïdouks, who hail from Romania. The music from Tuva is much different; The Gypsy sounds from Romania are gone, and what is left from a recording of Huun-Huur-Tu is a sound that has risen near the Mongolian steppe from shepherds living among reindeer and sheep. The sounds are full of life and sorrow.
Huun-Huur-Tu is a group who transports the listener. The music transcends anything you have going on in your day. I can only say you need to hear them.
Scroll down on Amazon and you will be given samples from the album The Orphan's Lament.

Amazing sounds huh? Here is a bit of biography I found on the internet:


Ted Levin, an American ethnomusicologist who has been working in partnership with the musicians, talks about his introduction to Tuvan overtone singing in the early 80's:

"I first found out about the Tuvans when the physicist Richard Feynman sent us a tape from an old record he had, from Russia, (with a note) that said, 'Thought you guys might be interested in this.' When I heard it, I was blown away. I decided then and there I had to meet the people who were making those sounds."


Richard Feynman, once a participant in the Los Alamos project, was fighting cancer, and his lifetime dream was to visit the mysterious land of Tannu Tuva, the origin of the exotic stamp collection he had acquired as a youth, and to get acquainted with its musical tradition of throat singing.
His heroic attempt to overcome the seemingly unending obstacles in obtaining a visa to Tuva is chronicled by his friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton in the book 'Tuva or Bust!'. Feynman passed away early 1988, just a few weeks before the Soviet authorities agreed to issue the visa. Leighton and friends undertook the journey in honor of Richard.


In 1987, Ted Levin became the first American to do ethnographic fieldwork in what was then the Soviet Autonomous Republic of Tuva, a sparsely settled region of grasslands, boreal forests, and mountain ridges that lies some 2,500 miles east of Moscow, and is situated at the geographical centre of Asia, north of Mongolia. Sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the USSR Union of Composers, Levin's American-Russian-Tuvan expedition surveyed the traditional expressive culture of Tuva's sheep and reindeer herders, focusing on the musical technique of "xöömei" or throat-singing, in which a single vocalist simultaneously produces two distinct pitches: a fundamental note and, high above it, a series of articulated harmonics that are sequenced into melodies and manipulated with extreme virtuosity in several canonical styles. These field recordings became a CD released in 1990 by Smithsonian Folkways called Tuva: Voices from the Center of Asia.


Traditionally, Tuvan overtone singing had been performed by soloists, each specializing in a particular style of xöömei. In 1992 Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, Alexander Bapa, his brother Sayan Bapa, and Albert Kuvezin founded the quartet Kungurtuk, as a means of concentrating on the presentation of traditional songs of their homeland. While they devoted themselves to the preservation of these songs, their concerts have always demonstrated the significance of combining tradition and innovation. The musicians later decided to rename the ensemble "Huun-Huur-Tu".