Huun Huur Tu
If I'd Be Born an Eagle

THE REVIEW

Where is the music of Tuva going?

Exploring abandoned instruments? Towards the appropriation of Russian elements, now present for so long that they have the right to enter tradition? Recovering archaic modes hidden in the folds of the Mongolian mountains? Conquering a showcase of international level?

One never gets as far as when one no longer knows where they are going, Goethe claimed. "If I’d been born an eagle" is the third offering from the little-known yet highly accessible quartet Huun-Huur-Tu. Alien music that awakens distant echoes which, thinking over and over trying to identify, perhaps you heard three thousand years ago when, on horseback, you migrated with your barbarian village towards the wild Far West (of Europe). Mysteries of Bulgarian voices? Steppes of Central Asia? My Peruvian guest started humming the melody too: did he hear Andean inflections?
The fact is that this music communicates. It communicates with everyone.

It communicates because it is friendly, companionable, full of expression and free of pretensions. Who doesn't like vastness in a landscape, rhythm in a horse, beans in a soup, nostalgia in the lyrics of a song? These are the songs that Tuva's radio broadcasts every day and that everyone, young and old, knows. These songs, rustic beauties, to us who no longer know who we are, whom we belong to, and where we are going, provide the coordinates of faces and places, proposing a sense of clan and territory that helps us find direction.

A direction to go far, to Tuva and beyond.