Heavy metal nomads hit Vancouver
Tengger Cavalry can lay claim to being the world’s best known nomadic death folk metal band. As heavy metal subsets go, it isn’t the most populated of genres. But if you like mouth harp, horse-head fiddle and overtone throat singing mixed with pummelling
1 Nomadic folk metal
“Tengri/Tengger is the sky god of Mongolian and Turkic shamanism,” Nature says. “I wanted to make music that balanced my love of the traditional music from Mongolia with its horse-trot rhythms, but with the intensity of heavy metal, and discovered the two pair exceptionally well.”
2 The membership
“This started as a solo project,” Nature says, “but then I met Robert (McLaughlin), who was already an accomplished traditional player, at the annual Naadam Festival in Mongolia. We added Uljmuren from Inner Mongolia, and the others came along. We are all over the place, but come together when we need to.”
3 The following
“We have over 4,000 Facebook followers in Mongolia proper and dream to play there soon, but for the moment we are concentrating on Europe and North America and finding that the results are good. Metal fans are really willing to check out something different all the time,” Nature says.
4 Krutaya Gora
“That is the Russian translation of the title song from our latest Mountain Side EP sung by our bassist Alex (Abayev),” Nature says. “I had this idea that he should record the Russian lyrics when he was really, really drunk on vodka. He did and we really liked it.”
5 Club remixes
“We’ve done a few club mixes of our songs and — honestly — I have no idea what kind of clubs would play them, but I really like club and DJ music, so why not? And it would be a really good club if they played our stuff,” Nature says.