Tengger Cavalry
The Rickshaw, 254 E. Hastings | Saturday, 10 p.m. | Tickets/Info: $14.50 at rickshawtheatre.com
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 pagan riffage, this quintet is it.
Founded in New York City six years ago by Beijing-born and raised Chinese singer/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Nature Ganganbaigal, the group features Russian-born bassist Alex Abayev, Inner Mongolian fiddler Uljmuren and American drummer Josh Schifris and second fiddler Robert McLaughlin. Vice, The Guardian, even the Wall Street Journal has sung the band’s praises. It sold out a Christmas Eve show at Carnegie Hall.
The ride up the Steppes to Heaven is doubtless a long one. Nature is pursuing a passion that began with studying Mongolian folk traditions as a kid to learn about his family heritage, pursuing it further into the country to learn to fully express it and then carried it right through to the present in New York. Here are five things about the group:
1 – Nomadic Folk Metal: “Tengri/Tengger is the sky god of Mongolian and Turkic shamanism,” said Nature. “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 but then I met Robert, 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.”
4 – Krutaya Gora: “That is the Russian translation of the title song from our latest Mountain Side EP sung by our bassist Alex. 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 has also recorded a Mongolian ambient folk album, acoustic albums and contributed to soundtracks).
