Sainkho - From Siberia with passion

Woven through with light, space and time, the voice of Siberian singer Sainkho Namtchylak has timbral qualities that make it utterly unique. Clear as spring water, it ranges from the highest to the lowest registers with a prodigious extension, gaining singular intensity through sudden shifts in vibration, alternating translucent tones with dense, dark ones, and, to astonishing effect, pouring out in a double emission of tones bound together by a harmonic link. This artist's performance, accompanied by traditional instruments from her homeland (tabla, duduk, small violin, jaw harp), alongside double bass and guitar, right through to the most sophisticated technology (synths, drum machines), is a weave of tradition and modernity, a journey that draws on Siberian and Mongolian folk musical roots while traversing the sounds of both past and present.

Sainkho was born in a village in southern Siberia on the border with Mongolia, in the former Soviet republic of Tuva: her parents were teachers, her grandparents nomads. After completing a classical musical education in Moscow that began at the conservatory in her hometown, she enriched it with studies of Siberian, shamanic and Lamaist traditions.

She fell in love with music thanks to her grandmother, and soon began studying both the traditional Tuvan repertoire and the art of overtone singing, a vocal practice until then reserved solely for men. She completed her musical studies in Moscow and immediately afterwards joined the Tuvan State Folk Ensemble, with whom she performed for a brief period. Sainkho returned to Moscow at the end of the 1980s and joined the experimental band Tri-O, with whom her vocal talent and pronounced melodic and harmonic sense found their fullest expression. With this new musical project she travelled to the West for the first time, though it was with her debut album Out Of Tuva that she drew attention on the international music scene. An intricate, inextricable blend of traditional ethnic elements fused with the most disparate of modern styles.

One wonders what vocal mechanism underlies Sainkho's sonic world, from what depths of the unconscious she draws to translate into song the murmur of wind through birch and fir forests, the sweep of the tundra, the chill of the winds, the voices of animals, evoked with comic grace, and what relationship her voice bears to light, space, spirit, transcendence.

With her shaved head, multicoloured silk saris, sumptuous scarves or rough hemp outfits, the small woman with Eastern features seems unreachable; almost motionless in the composed grace of her gestures, she seems to concede nothing to extroversion. A calling for abstraction? Only on stage, where concentration transforms her into a high priestess of sound. But away from the spotlight, Sainkho's metamorphosis is startling. She wears sporty sweatshirts, a platinum wig, ankle boots; flashes of wit break through her otherwise impenetrable expression, and she's not averse to a glass of wine to ease the tension and round off, in good cheer, concerts applauded above all by young audiences. "I address such remote sounds to them," the singer explains, "to make them understand that there's no incompatibility in music, that there are other sonorities besides the deafening ones that usually bombard them, to remind them that music can bring harmony and unity, and to prove that the past can be grafted onto the future." Her voice continually leaps, plays with improvisation, moves from celestial harmonies to shrill dissonances, emerging from the nose, the throat, the gut. And yet she sustains the sound with the boldest of balances. But how does one arrive at such tonal acrobatics? "It takes study and a great deal of strength. But it's just vocal technique. It can be learned, and it can be taught."

After the fall of the communist regime, Namtchylak made Vienna her base and began collaborating with international artists, giving free rein to her urge for artistic experimentation by releasing a series of albums centred on free improvisation. In 1997 she was horrifically attacked by a Russian neo-Nazi group that left her in a coma for several weeks. Out of this terrifying episode came 1998's Naked Spirit, which leans towards new age sounds and went on to win the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis.

With the new millennium came a new phase in Sainkho's musical career. In 2001 she released Stepmother City on Ponderosa Music & Art, an album reflecting her ambivalent feelings about her move to Western Europe and serving as a filter through which to begin discovering and appreciating Eastern spirituality. The album was followed by Time Out in 2001 and Who Stole The Sky? in 2003.

In 2005 Namtchylak embarked on a new artistic endeavour, publishing, through the Libero di Scrivere imprint, a book of poems titled "Karmaland".

In 2016 came Like A Bird Or Spirit, Not A Face, one of the peaks of her new-millennium output, yet also a work that lays bare all the strengths and weaknesses the artist has shown over the years. There's little boldness in the songwriting, and a few musical choices are repeated once too often. Even so, her allure remains undiminished: her voice has the power to carry us in and out of creation and time at an astonishing speed, forever straddling the Western world and the Eastern world of her native land. An arrival that is no ending for the wonderful Sainkho Namtchylak, but a necessary starting point for a journey back in time for anyone about to dip for the first time into the luminous waters of her authentic voice.

The collaboration between Sainkho Namtchylak and Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan returns in 2023 with Water Meets Water: Bird Songs And Lullabies, a set of songs improvised and recorded in locations around the abandoned islands of Venice.

Although Sainkho speaks four languages fluently (Tuvan, Russian, English and German), to make this collection of songs she chose to explore phonetics, singing entirely in the "language of nature". Accompanying her voice is an instrument as pure and natural as water.

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