The outstanding vocalist and »world music« star Sainkho Namtchylak is already well known to the domestic audience, as her mix of traditional throat singing techniques derived from Central Asian cultures and contemporary vocal acrobatics has already excited the crowd on her performances at the festival editions of Druga godba in the 1990s. Sainkho Namtchylak, who hails from the former Soviet Republic of Tuva and has lived in Europe for many years, represents a kind of distillate of the kind of contemporary vocalist that turns the vocal tradition into a more contemporary invention and where the body acts as an extension of the voice, not the other way around.
Sainkho Namtchylak hails from Central Asia, the former Soviet socialist republic of Tuva, which borders Mongolia. It was here that the singer began to train her voice in the traditional techniques of overtone singing, which was usually the domain of male performers. She learned this singing from her grandmother and then perfected her voice at various music institutions of the former Soviet Union. Sainkho Namtchylak’s pioneering work is based on the introduction of traditional ways of overtone singing into the field of avant-garde jazz, electronic music and modern musical composition, where her voice suddenly sounded like a crowd rather than a monolith. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the singer suffered some personal losses and turmoil but soon experienced a lightning renown in the international arena and turned into an international star of world music.
In the 1990s, she released a series of albums, each of which transcended the boundaries of the music genres and became hits. Sainkho Namtchylak works as a multi-instrumentalist with her voice, as the wide range of her various voice uses is astounding, while bringing voice modalities into the sound box with the textures of her voice, in which the voice is not dissuaded in form, but materializes in its corporeality and rubs against the listener’s skin.
Organisation: CoFestival in co-production with Kino Šiška and Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia.
