Letters: — being earth songs from a true pioneer

New Internationalist, March, 1998 by Sainkho Namchylak

WORLD music has become such a compromised beast. Cross-cultural fun has turned into aural salve. Increasingly it gets marketed in forms digestible to Western audiences, which have less to do with a meeting of musical minds than considerations of lushness, feelgood potential, and track length. Admittedly artists of integrity do shine through with their distinctive voices no matter what the studio treatment, but largely we as consumers get what we expect, sunshine on CD from Africa, salsa fire from South America, floating haunt-stuff from Scandinavia. Occasionally anomalies may bother us - such as when artists from nations with the most hideous political situations churn out the dippy happy vibe, or when translated lyrics sit uneasily with our own values. For me the packaging of culture in tidy portions is the most serious consequence.

So it's all the more rewarding that the glorious voice of Tuvan singer Sainkho Namchylak cuts through cosy categories and moves all the goal posts in its dramatic experimentation. At the beginning of her career she performed the traditional shamanic music of her southern Siberian homeland, but disguised as pop music because the Soviet authorities discouraged shamanic practice. A stance that could be viewed as subversion, compromise, or possibly a bit of both.

Since then she has taken full control of the direction of her music and broken out of the ethno-exotica trappings that have often claimed `foreign' singers with great voices. Such as Yma Sumac, the Peruvian with a glass-shattering range, whose stunning improvisations never received any copyright credit.

Tuva, a land of stamp-collectors' dreams, is flavour of the month with exotica fans. And even though classically trained - Namchylak is one of the few women accomplished in Tuvan overtone singing - she follows her own unique musical vision. Her rise in so-called Improv circles has been phenomenal, but here too she is breaking the rules of this supposedly free terrain. As a vocalist she refuses to be a mere pendant to the male-dominated scene's instrumentalists. She is unafraid of melody and emotion (always suspicious to musical `radicals'), and incorporates ancient singing techniques into her compositions.

Letters (1993) is a stirring testament to the territory she has carved out. Collaborating with some of Improv's brightest - Joelle Leandre (bass), Mats Gustaffson (sax), Sten Sandell (piano) - Namchylak seems intent on voicing the entire gamut of human emotion. The album sleeve contains letters from Sainkho to her beloved father, who died in 1992. She recounts the hubbub of travel between events, a dismal performance before a tiny, unappreciative audience at a prestigious jazz festival, her embarrassment at being introduced to a living legend not having heard his work. `Because I couldn't speak English I was like a fish out of water offstage. I could only gesticulate with my hands or nod with my head.' Elsewhere she has spoken of the loneliness of being an improviser with an Asian logic who usually works with musicians from Western traditions. In the corresponding tracks Namchylak tries out an unsure little voice, overtaken by a squabble of styles, eventually resolved in long honeyed phrases.

One of the letters is from her father, concerned whether he has been a good parent, wondering when she will find a partner. This solo track begins with an impossibly low sub-bass drone that turns the entire room into a giant larynx, a veil of skin through which the wind seems to pass. It is a kind of wise grumbling, seismic yet intimate. Later comes throat work of such visceral intensity that one expects shreds of flesh to come flying out of the speakers.

The tracks are journeys, shamanic voicings of people, rocks, trees, winds, a distant tapping in a far-off cave, a desire to be in time and out of time. On Letter 5, the spectral piano of Sten Sandell perfectly complements a fragile yet immaculately realized meditation on remembrance and loss. Letter 6 contains a statement of intent: `I am beginning to comprehend my real role in this world. I think that I am a necessary connecting link in the chain of cultural continuity between the past and the future, between the people of the East and the West. Like an antenna, tuned to a certain frequency, I perceive ideas in the form of images and thoughts and I believe in their realization. The basis of these ideas is the community of people, their historic, continuity, expressed in music, in my singing.'

The final track is just a few seconds long, the voice sweet, uncertain, lost, a child searching for its parent. It's a necessary, very human postscript to Namchylak's journeys to the frontiers of sound. She is a true pioneer, a one-off, using her vast palette and virtuosic technique to convey visions. That she manages so well without words is her singular achievement.

Dinyar Godrej

Letters by Sainkho Namchylak is available on CD through Leo Records (LR 190).