SAINKHO NAMCHYLAK / NICK SUDNICK – Not Quite Songs

Leo

Always a great pleasure returning to the exuberant ebullience and sensitive reminiscing of Sainkho Namchylak’s voice. In this case, though, it’s perhaps her comrade Nick Sudnick (credited as composer) who causes the outcome to be well over average. By utilizing an array of peculiar stringed instruments – which he calls “electro-acoustic sound objects” – besides reeds and accordion in some of the tracks, Sudnick conjures up the metrical grace of an eerie poetry, and meshes it with the concreteness of a flea market of scattered melodies and disembodied tunes. Upon these structures – which, depending on the circumstance, assume the nuances of an Eastern desert’s echoes or recall the insides of a crazy clock’s mechanism, occasionally flowing into an absurdist cartoon soundtrack (“Play 10”) – the Tuvan vocalist moves with a typically unique flair made of impractical solutions that, sung with the same lack of pretension of a little girl at play, appear as the most natural phenomenon on earth. Namchylak evokes an equal degree of enchantress and goblin according to what the music requires, but is also perfect in the role of conscious housewife in a haunted house, intoning informal prayers one moment and responding to mystifying noises and sociable specters the next. 75 minutes digested without a second of tiredness, a highly recommended disc.