Otgonbayar Chuluunbaatar and Wolfgang Hofer

September 25, 2007

Otgonbayar Chuluunbaatar and Wolfgang Hofer | Zastiin Nogoodoi |Zakhchin Music | Mongolia

At the tail end of the second millennium, father and son John and Alan Lomax traveled the rural south of the United States collecting the last vestiges of music transmitted solely by way of mouth in that part of the world. Ironically, the means of their effort--the technologies of motorized transport and sound recording--were also the means of "pure" folk music's demise. These harbingers of modernity came later to much of the world, and in the third millennium there are still Lomaxes out there trying to catch the last drops of musical streams running dry.

Western Mongolian singer Otgonbayar Chuluunbaatar is one of these. As the youth of her Zakhchin tribe, which numbers only 25,000, move from the steppes to the cities, blending with the Khalkha majority and listening to popular music, they break with the oral tradition of Zakhchin songs. Chuluunbaatar has made it her mission to collect these songs, which she says have never been transcribed or studied.

On Zastiin Nogoodoi, the third in a series of Zakhchin music she has produced, Chuluunbaatar sings more than 30 "short" and "long" songs--so described not because of their total length, but for the way the long songs stretch out syllables. Unaccompanied or with the simple companionship of Wolfgang Hofer's guitar or Altaic lute, her strong, emotive voice brings to life tales of mountains, drunkards and horses.

Her voice is the voice of a thousand voices before her, filling a space where silence may otherwise have been, providing a glimpse of the soul of a people you may otherwise have never known. Once again, the hand of technology cuts off a cultural stream, then casts its droplets out to unexpected places, far and wide.

For ordering information, contact the artist: zakhchinmusic@yahoo.de