The ultimate boy band is back in town — all the way from Tuva.
The Alash Ensemble is a four-man band of Khoomei singers, which refers to a technique of throat singing originating in the Russian republic of Tuva. Right now they’re touring the United States, playing a gig at West Philly’s Rotunda Tuesday night.
Alash, like any great boy band, is interested in romance. But that doesn’t mean they write songs about chasing teenage girls. Rather, they perform traditional melodies capturing the pastoral intimacy of their nomadic culture.
Their niche American target would likely be the horse girl demographic. Between songs about women, land, and ancestral honor performed Tuesday night were love songs for the animals to which Tuvans ascribe as much spirituality as they do to people or rivers or rocks.
I’m more of a dog person, but the piece that stood out to me Tuesday night was a trotting ballad about a herder and his horse. One Alash member said it was an ode to the men who care for thousands of horses or sheep as his life’s work. Beyond that brief introduction, I was unable to track down the song’s titles or lyrics in order to unpack the music’s meaning. Nor did I need to — the sound stood alone in spinning a story.
While layered frequencies are the central feature of throat singing, the star power of that particular tune was an overlapping rush of real-life rhythm. The group used a percussive instrument known as the duyuglar — a pair of horse hooves that are clapped together — to recreate the animal’s clop-clopping pattern. The ensemble also showcased the shyngryash, a bundle of small bells like those used as ornaments on the heads and necks of horses, as well as the xapchyk, a rattle fashioned out of dried bull scrotum, to achieve similarly embodied sounds.
Whinnying string instruments bounced easily between up- and downbeats in a saddle-style flow. I was so entranced by the vibrational landscape that it took several songs before I noticed the bodies of the instruments themselves were homages to the group’s sonar subjects; the two-stringed igil, for example, boasted a peghead carved like a horse’s muzzle.
Though neither horses nor Alash Ensemble are native to North America, the ostensible barriers of language and lifestyle between audience and stage performers evaporated along the concert’s ride.
Tuvan throat singing might sound niche or esoteric to most, but it’s more pop than One Direction — if we consider that the male gaze is less universal than the horse’s.
