Sainkho Namchylak, a native of Tuva, is relatively well known for her brilliant accommodation of throat-singing techniques to free improvisation, using a body of traditional techniques to create music of extraordinarily expressive power, mixing high-pitched metallic sounds and multiphonics in ways that can both surprise and move a listener. Her partner here, Nick Sudnick, is less celebrated outside of Russia, but he launched the St. Petersburg industrial band ZGA in 1984 and has been a key figure in Russian noise art ever since. An instrument builder as well as a composer and performer, Sudnick won’t make you think of noise here. He’s constructed a series of string and percussion instruments with often delicate sounds and sliding, bending pitches that suggest the music of Harry Partch, setting Namchylak’s voice amidst sounds that are as evocative and evanescent as her singing. The tracks include improvised components, but there’s a considerable amount of computer programming evident in Sudnick’s dense overlays of strings, percussion, and reeds. Play 2 suggests folk sources, while Play 5 has Namchylak concentrating on her upper register, combining with Sudnick’s strings to evoke bird calls. Together the two elaborate a sonic world entirely their own.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.