You may have heard Tuvan throat singing, a style that involves a performer vocalizing several notes at once. But YOU probably have never heard Tuvan throat singing like this.

Tuvan electronica - that’s what this is. It’s music from the leaders of the genre, Huun Huur Tu. They hail from the remote Russian region of Tuva. Huun Huur Tu has been around since 1992. And they’re not opposed to updating traditional Tuvan sounds. After all, this group has worked with Frank Zappa, The Chieftains, and The Kronos Quartet.

 

 

The whistling of the high-mountain wind forms eerie overtones and postmodern statement. The repeated thrum of a string against wood and hide turns into a meditative, evocative figure straight from the avant-garde. The descendants of isolated Siberian herdsmen make serious, strangely universal music out of some of the planets quirkiest acoustics.

 

 

The Tuvan acoustic quartet Huun Huur Tu prove that Tuvan music can take plenty of intelligent innovation. Using traditional instruments and drawing subtly on 20th-century composers, funky rhythms, and the decades they spent honing their overtone singing, Huun Huur Tu transforms ancient songs into complex acoustic compositions. Beginning over seventeen years ago, Huun Huur Tu has almost single-handedly introduced the outside world to the boundless wealth of Tuvan traditions, thanks in great part to their superior musicianship.

 

 

Huun-Huur-Tu is a music group from Tuva, a Russian Federation republic situated on the Mongolian border. The most distinctive characteristic of Huun Huur Tu’s music is throat singing, in which the singers sing both the note (drone) and the drone’s overtone(s), thus producing two or three notes simultaneously. The overtone may sound like a flute, whistle or bird, but is actually solely a product of the human voice.

The group primarily uses native Tuvan instruments such as the Igil, Khomus (Tuvan jaw harp), Doshpuluur, and Dünggür (shaman drum). However, in recent years, the group has begun to selectively incorporate western instruments, such as the guitar. While the thrust of Huun Huur Tu’s music is fundamentally indigenous Tuvan folk music, they also experiment with incorporating not only Western instruments but electronic music as well.