My friend Anil had, about two months ago, passed on to me a huge swag of mp3s and movies, a 240-GB distillation of the goodies available on the LAN of his institute. It will take me some time before I actually get to listen to, or watch all of it, but I am doing my best.

Saturday night, high on the after-effects of Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spiderman, I went home. No one was around, and after messing around with Opposing Force for about an hour, I decided to let the streak continue and started reading Planetary. Put on some music, hit random on Winamp and started off with issue 1 of the Warren Ellis series. There were nineteen issues in all, and a couple of crossover issues and it took me quite a long time to finish them all. Far more, in fact, than it took to read thirty eight issues of UXM. Because I was distracted by the music.

In the middle of issue 1, this very strange, goosepimply voice started singing, with minimal instruments playing along. What drew me to the singing was the fact that it resembled the folk music of Assam – the Namghoriya form, we call it, more of chanting and clapping, a community exercise where the loudest voices are those of the old folks, who put their soul into this devotional singing. The voice singing this song was exactly that way, a dry, rolling tone that would seem harsh if you were not in the mood to be unhappy. I checked Winamp, the artiste ID said it was by Huun Huur Tu, I hadn’t heard of them ( I guessed it was a band, and not a person) before, but whoever they were, wherever they were from, the music was superb.

I erased everything from my playlist but the Huun Huur Tu songs, there were twelve of them, and started playing them in a loop. Awesome. It was an amazing feeling, reading Planetary with this particular background music. The voice!! It murmured and gurgled and messed with my head in strange ways. Sometimes it was like the singer has forgotten to breathe. Heard a digeridoo? Sometimes the voice took on the precise tone of that Australian instrument, with occasional change to a high bubbly tone. “Digital manipulation.”, I thought. Then yesterday, I did some research on Huun Huur Tu and came up with this Scientific American article that explains that it’s a band from Tuva ( think Mongolia/Siberia), and the particular kind of singing is khöömeior khoomii, from the Mongolian word for “throat.The article explains it this way – “a remarkable singing technique in which a single vocalist produces two distinct tones simultaneously. One tone is a low, sustained fundamental pitch, similar to the drone of a bagpipe. The second is a series of flutelike harmonics, which resonate high above the drone and may be musically stylized to represent such sounds as the whistle of a bird, the syncopated rhythms of a mountain stream or the lilt of a cantering horse.” Amazing, really.

The tragic part – out of the twelve mp3s, about six have annoying blips and clicks in them, not bad enough to distract from the song, but irritating anyways. If anyone is inspired enough to download/own any of their songs, please do give me a buzz.