SAINKHO NAMTCHYLAK, the new album “where water meets water: bird songs and lullabies” out on March 31st 2023 via Ponderosa Music Records

Listen to the full album at https://orcd.co/drkxdkp

TRACKLIST
1 Inside Asylum
2 Search & Rescue
3 Migration Trails
4 Rising Tides
5 At Pier’s Edge
6 Reverse Healing
7 Singing to the Sea

Produced & Engineered by Ian Brennan
Executive producer: Titti Santini
All vocals: Sainkho Namtchylak
All instruments: Ian Brennan

Following-up on their 2015 critically-acclaimed collaborative album with Tinariwen, Sainko Namtchylak and Grammy-winning producer, Ian Brennan return with a set of songs improvised and recorded on location across the abandoned islands of Venice.
Sainkho speaks four languages (Tuvan, Russian, English, German), but chose for this collection to sing phonetically in the “language of nature.”
The main accompanying instrument on the album is water. Recorded on-location and 100% live without overdubs, the album is a celebration of simultaneity.
“People often don’t realize how large the Venetian lagoon is. It is filled with abandoned islands. There’s a multi-layered history to the city of people trying to survive that stretches back over fifteen-hundred years. And that struggle continues today, where in the face of mass tourism, the majority of residents have been displaced and the population dwindled to a point where the center of the city itself has largely been aban- doned,” states Brennan who has lived on the islands for the past decade.
In defiance of the “visual album” trend where image often carries more weight than sound, the goal of this project was to create an “audio film” indelibly imbued by time and place.
One track was recorded on the most haunted island in Venice, a spot that many claim is the most haunted place on earth. An estimated 160,000 people died there and rumors are that over 50% of the soil is made of human ash. A psychiatrist who conducted brain surgery experiments on patients ended up committing sui- cide by throwing himself from atop the tower. Sainkho’s multi-octave voice can be heard bouncing off the walls of the former asylum, creating an other-worldly reverb.
During another song, a search-and-rescue mission appeared, extracting swimmers from the ocean. The heli- copter hovered overhead as the Namtchylak and Brennan recorded on the fortress rooftop where Venetians had downed one of Napoleon’s ships after he invaded in the 18th century.

For another tune, a sullen, middle-aged snorkeler sat bothered by the musicians presence at the end of a breakwater pier reaching out into the Adriatic Sea.
Hailing from Tuva, Namtchylak is one of the rare throat singers who is female. Battling against misogyny, since 1990 she has gone on to release nearly fifty albums.

#sainkhonamtchylak #ponderosarecords