Tuvan music meets rock and roll in Yat-Kha, the group formed by Huun-Huur-Tu founding member Albert Kuvezin in the early 1990s.

 

Always searching for a way to find the pure connection between rock and traditional music, Kuveezin paid close attention to the sounds and effects used by rock musicians, and eventually took those elements to invigorate and ignite the music his ancestors grew up with.

 

 

Taking cues from psychedelic rock from the 1960s, industrial electronica, and heavy metal, there’s a sense of danger to the band’s music – where outbursts of punk gallant supplement by impossibly low growls bleed into ethno-surf jams elevated to stadium rock status by face-melting guitar work as well as their ingenious integration of traditional instruments like the cello-esque igil and doshpular as well as the instantly recognizable guzheng.

 

The band has been around the world and back, headlining festivals like Transglobal Underground and WOMAD in Berlin, performing alongside such heavyweights as Oysterband, The Chieftains, as well as renowned Russian keyboardist Andrei Sokolovsky. The esteemed Brain Eno even awarded Albert’s ‘unique double-bass voice and its mixture of thunderous growling and high harmonics’ with a special prize at the Alma-Aty festival Voices of Asia. Since visiting China in 1998 to perform at a music festival in Hong Kong, Kuvezin has returned to the maintime several times as a solo artist, as well as with his band Yat-Kha.

 

"Our musicians love to perform here. Personally, I like the Chinese instrument, the guzheng (Chinese zither) very much," says Kuvezin, who is a master of khoomei and plays the dopshuur as well as a number of other instruments such as the guitar, bass, piano, jaw harp and balalaika.