SAINKHO NAMTCHYLAK (TUVA)
Jon Lusk (courtesy of fRoots)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/awards2005/profile_sainkhonamtchylak.shtm
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Extreme vocalist, performance artist and musical chameleon, Sainkho
Namtchylak could be lazily described as 'Tuva's answer to Yoko Ono'.
She prefers to call herself 'first and foremost a woman of the
steppes', despite the fact that she now lives in Austria and has
conducted her entire career outside the remote Central Asian
republic where she was born in 1957. Regardless of whether she sings
in English or Tuvan, or adopts one of several free-range non-verbal
personae, her work constitutes an oblique, bittersweet and sometimes
downright perverse musical love letter to her homeland.

Sainkho grew up in an isolated gold-mining village, immersed in a
culture where music was all pervasive and unselfconscious. Her first
musical inspiration came from the lullabies of her nomadic
grandmother. A non-conformist nature meant that her first attempts
at formal music training were shunned by a local college, which
prompted a move to Moscow. There, she discovered improvisation and
studied Siberian lamaistic and shamanistic traditions as well as
Tuvan and Mongolian overtone singing. A stint with the state-
sponsored folklore ensemble Sayani and the group Tri-O followed,
before she went solo in 1990.

The interconnectedness of nature and spirituality, urban alienation
and Buddhist philosophy are pervading lyrical themes in her work,
which walks a fine line between dream-like and nightmarish
qualities, and has a pervading sense of melancholy. Tuvan blues?
Yes, but also drum 'n' bass, ethno-jazz, electronica, classical,
dance and world music, alongside various elements of her own roots.
Marrying tradition and the avant-garde, she's no purist.

"Some people perceive traditional music as like a piece of stone
from the prehistorical time; archaeologist, he finds it and he keeps
it the way it is. But some people really believe that music is a
floating river," she explains in typically poetic style.

Sainkho has released over thirty albums, many of them off-the-wall
collaborations pretty much outside the remit of these awards. "Out
of Tuva" (Cramworld, 1993) has some of her earliest and most
folkloric recordings, and "Naked Spirit" (Amiata, 1999) features a
collaboration with Armenian duduk player Djivan
Gasparyan. "Stepmother City" (Ponderosa, 2000) is Sainkho at her
most accessible, while the mini-album "Time Out" (Ponderosa 2001)
includes several examples of traditional Tuvan songs as well as
excursions into African rhythms. This motif is extended by the use
of Lao Kouyate's kora on her most recent release "Who Stole The
Sky?" (Ponderosa, 2003) which is both experimental and beautiful.