Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to this great Tuvan throat-singing punk band: Yat-kha. This is definitely going on the to-buy list. Not the most recent album, Re-Covers (they’re covering Led Zeppelin, Kraftwerk, Bob Marley! but the two tracks available as mp3 didn’t do much for me) but some of the older stuff such as Aldyn Dashka and Yenisei Punk. The first of these two seems to be more traditional and lighter — in fact I wouldn’t describe any of this as “punk” except for the fantastic grunty Sovet Churtum (on the Yenisei Punk album). Unlike the gimmicky Re-Covers tracks, this one uses that massive rumbling style to pure and honest effect. It’s sold me on the album.
But don’t take my word for it. Go to the site, listen to all the tracks. I don’t think any apart from Sovet Churtum are great, but many are very good. And the style of the band has changed significantly through their seven albums (tracks from five online), partly I suspect due to differing lineups, so don’t just listen to a couple of tracks from one album and give up.
For throat-singing aficionados, the dominant style here is the octave-below undertone (I’m no expert, but this is apparently called “kargyraa”) heavily featured in the film Genghis Blues (you should try to see this film, by the way, it’s extraordinary) but the tracks from the older albums also include some overtone harmonics (”sygyt”).
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you read MR?? It’s one of my favorites.
As you can maybe guess from the subject here, I don’t exactly read it for the economics :-)