Sainkho Namtchylak
Lost Rivers

THE REVIEW

Like nightingales. The singers sing like nightingales.

But Sainkho sings like nightingales, chickadees, owls, toucans, hoopoes, and peacocks. Like storks, ostriches, pelicans, and platypuses. And bats, badgers, penguins, and pterodactyls.

Singers sing emotions. But Sainkho has realized that only those who are in danger can truly feel something. Thus, Sainkho lowers our threshold of reaction with an anthology of vital processes ("Cschai-su") and survival techniques ("Ach so", "Long continuum") for solo voice. Fulfilling the imperative of communication, Sainkho disproves the solipsism of the human condition and denies the supposed void of existence.

Life is an exercise whose value is found at the end of a book written with blood, spit, sweat, and tears. Sainkho does not hide the stains, does not smooth the creases like Tamia does, who prefers allusion to the brutality of representation. Life, voice are one for both man and animal ("Tundra und Taiga" and especially the moving "Night birds"), nightmares are the same for everyone ("Dream of death") and suffering also unites us, naked apes, to the peoples of other living beings ("Lost rivers").

Life is the unrhymed poetry of the sacred and the profane (the noble "Houwa" and the mischievous "White food"). An impressive and exhaustive business card.