Observations of language: meaning vs sound, in various contexts and spaces, on native and foreign tongues.
On this alien soil, the words coming out of my mouth all of a sudden sound abstract and arbitrary - held up and strung together only by my intention - its usual meaning useless - I cannot feel them and they are squares I'm trying to squeeze through round holes. At the same time, this same language flowers in the mouths of my new friends whose limited vocabulary makes the space of simple words expand exponentially in their innocently poetic use. Perhaps it is also that the words are being spoken by amazing musicians/artists/human beings whose depth of experience/feeling and expression of experience/feeling cannot be contained by mere meaning - they must be shaped by the manifestation of sounds and felt in the space between sounds.
When I asked one of the Huun Huur Tu members, Sayan (a co-founder of the band) what they had been singing/chanting in rehearsals, he said:
"Nothing. Only these words and these sounds all together. We sing these words to feel the sounds and some times when we sing a sound it becomes very big inside and then we know what it means. All the time we are working to make the sounds MORE."
He explains to me that the actual words are selections from a poem called Children of the Otter by Velimir Khlebnikov, on which the composer Vladimir Martynov based his orchestral composition. They are not the Tuvan words of Huun Huur Tu, nor are they in the order in which Khlebnikov wrote them, but are compiled/curated by Martynov as a collage specifically to be expressed through a sequence of sounds that happen to also be words and may happen to have meanings in context with each other. So Huun Huur Tu is engaged in the textural pushing and pulling process with Martynov and his wife Tatiana in their exploration of these sounds.
It is utterly visceral and fascinating.
They are birthing a dark and beautiful creature together in this music - with the guttural bones and rhythm of its Tuvan father and the sinewy muscles and tonality of its Russian mother.
Are you as turned on as I am by this? If you are not, you should be. Trust me - if you were in the same room with the powerful energy of the sound they are creating you WOULD be.
Tuvans make all their instruments by hand. Here are just a few of them:
HORSE HOOVES (click together Monty Python style):
BULL BALL
(aka. the ball sak of a bull. yeah, I mean exactly what you think I mean. Acts as a maracas-like shaker.
You know you want one.)
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