‘Mongol Pop’ is on the march

Last winter, Mongolia’s most popular pop-R&B singer, Bold, released an album called “Mongol Pop.” On the album cover, Bold wears a deel (the traditional dress) while sporting a faux-hawk. The music videos for the album’s songs are filled with running horses, traditional dances and even the blue scarf or khadak used in traditional ceremonies.

“My goal in creating Mongol Pop is to show Mongolians’ great tradition within my songs,” explained Bold.

For musicians like Bold, creating “Mongol Pop” was a way to both honor Mongolian culture and reach a broader audience by providing a unique product. But for other bands, developing a Mongolian sound is a natural part of their own self-discovery.

This is the case with Mohanik. When they started writing the songs for their second album a year ago, they noticed an unintentional trend. All of the songs had a deep tie to Mongolia.

“We weren’t searching for a Mongolian sound,” says lead guitarist Tsojo. “It just came out.”

“It feels like a kind of different feeling from Western or British or American music,” adds Dawaa. “[We] are Mongolian people — or we have Mongolian blood. That’s why it sounds different.”

For Mohanik, the place where they recorded their album of Mongolian-flavored rock was just as important as the songs themselves.

Although about 40 percent of the country’s population lives in the capital city of Ulan Bator, almost everyone would agree that the Mongolian countryside is what makes the country special. With one of the lowest population densities in the world — 1.7 per square kilometer as of 2010 — the countryside feels completely untouched by humans.

It was this kind of place that Dawaa was referring to when he told me, “We hope that if we do our music in nature, our music will be alive.”

The original plan was to record each song in a different location around Mongolia’s diverse but vast geography, hitting up desert, mountains, lakes and grassland. But after realizing the logistical nightmare of trying to record an album without access to electricity, they decided on the monastery.