Hunn Huur Tu is a folk music quartet from Tuva, a small country located
between Mongolia and Russia. Its shamanistic culture pervades everyday life,
giving Tuvan music a compelling, trace inducing quality. The most striking
feature of Tuvan music is khöömei ­ throat singing. By constricting the
vocal chords and regulating breath, khöömei singers are able to produce
several notes simultaneously. The effect sounds otherworldly to non-Tuvan
ears, but is remarkably musical. The founder members of the band, Kaigal-ool
Khovalyg and Sayan Bapa, are largely responsible for introducing throat
singing to the West, even though the technique is familiar to many Canadian
Inuit tribes. 
 
Some ethnomusicologists theorize that music was born when humans attempted
to reproduce the sounds of the natural world. It seems especially true in
Tuvan music. Khöömei mimics the sound of wind whistling through mountain
passes or water bubbling over stones while the rhythms percussionist Alexey
Saryglar lays down bring to mind the sound of horses hooves on frozen
ground. Like many cultures, Tuvans don¹t differentiate between folk and
popular music. The songs here all deal with the hardships of living a
nomadic life on the steppes, and include reprises of several of the band¹s
best-known songs. The grimly beautiful ³Orphan¹s Lament² features a tortured
vocal by Khovalyg and the dark drone of an igil (two stringed violin/cello)
while ³Sixty Horses in My Herd,² is a Tuvan cowboy¹s nostalgic song about
his far away home. Other standouts include ³Eki Attar,² a love song driven
by a galloping beat and a wailing khöömei solo, ³Eerbek Aksy² a riding song
that sounds remarkably similar to an American cowboy song despite the
whistling throat singing and ³Prayer² an a cappella invocation that combines
throat singing with the group¹s rumbling baritones delivered in a normal
register. Hunn Huur Tu may sing in an unfamiliar language, but the music has
a propulsive groove and a deep soulful feeling that¹s universal.