Transcendent psychedelic ambience
Who they?
Translating as “unlimited expanse of sky” in Mongolian and “huge sea” in Hungarian, Tengger is made up of South Korean/Japanese couple, Itta and Marquido, who put travel at the epicentre of their musical influences. Very fitting, then, that their latest record is called ‘Nomad’.
Why Tengger?
Blending a mix of styles, they make annual pilgrimages to “dazzling locales” and record their music among a variety of cultures and environments. Fusing field recordings and analogue electronics, Tengger’s sound is a hypnotic one, combining new age, krautrock and even Asian folk at times. Neu!, Popul Vuh and Julianna Barwick are good musical reference points, but Tengger encompass a calming meditativeness that, they say, elevates “into a new era of Kosmiche transcendence”. A bold claim indeed, but from the sounds of ‘Nomad’, they have the goods to back it up.
Tell us more…
Honing their craft for over a decade, ‘Nomad’ opens with the dreamy, almost psychedelic rotations of ‘Achime’ accompanied with gorgeous soaring vocals and electronic textures that are like a gentler cousin to chiptune. Birdsong chatters into an ethereal voice across the hypnotic oscillations of ‘Bliss’, delicate synth notes echo into silence on ‘Water’, while an electronic krautrock rhythm chunters across ‘Eurasia’. And it’s only when you reach the delicate trickling of closer ‘Flow’ that your hypnotic journey is over. ‘Nomad’ is imbued with a momentum that keeps you transfixed. A new era of Kosmiche trancendence? We’ll keep our third eye open and searching, but we doubt that we’ll find anything else remotely close.
‘Nomad’ is out on Beyond Beyond Is Beyond
