CHIRGILCHIN!
Spent a night recently with Chirgilchin in the tiniest of tiniest UCI lecture halls in the company of three incomparably skilled Tuvan throat singers and a tragically small crowd of about 25 people.
For the record, Tuva is a small republic inside Russia, just north of Mongolia. Throat singing can only be explained by hearing it, so check out this video:
The night was remarkably organized by friend Sam Farzin of ACROBATICS EVERYDAY, who usually enchants Irvine with more standard college fare (ie: Voice on Tape, Devon Williams, Anna Oxygen, Dan Deacon, on and on and on).
My personal history with Tuvan throat singing doesn't go that far back, but it runs deep. I netflixed Genghis Blues a few years ago and watched it over and over again. I was drawn in by the story: blind man discovers Tuvan throat singing on a radio, picks up the art relatively quickly and ends up traveling to Tuva to sing with the masters. The music, however, is what kept the film to ingrained in my memory: hypnotic, droning and distant voices buried under miles of reverb. Like nothing I've ever heard.
Seeing it person made the event more real. The experience was transformed from simply strange to heartbreakingly beautiful. The simple folk instrumentation made a steady foundation for Chirgilchin's otherworldly vocal acrobatics: odd, gruff voices ascending into impossibly subtle and melodic overtones. Seeing it live cemented the idea in mind that throat singing is a gorgeous and intensely foreign craft, it's a shame this doesn't happen more often.