CANCELLED: Mongolia: Egschiglen / Khusugtun

Soaring throat singing and the sonorous horsehead fiddle – the music of the Mongolian nomads can now also be heard outside the world music scene. But very few people know how diverse the musical legacy of Genghis Khan’s homeland is. Egschiglen and Khusugtun present two fundamentally different approaches in a double-bill concert.

Egschiglen, now resident in Germany, represent a new kind of highly innovative Mongolian art music: festive hymns, shamanic songs of praise to nature spirits, and the legend of a mythical wrestler are fused with words and arrangements of classical music.

The musical language of Khusugtun, after the interval, is a little more direct. The young sextet from Ulaanbaatar also draw their inspiration from nature, and practice the energetic art of khoomei throat singing, in which swirling overtones resonate high above the deep fundamental. However, they dress it in groovy, jazzy arrangements that – even though it’s purely acoustic – at times have an almost rocky drive.