Another random walk through Youtube, following suggested links on the right side at random, led me to discover Mongol pop music, specifically this rap performer. Before you get turned off by the “rap” designation, that’s the closest I could come to describing this blend of traditional Mongolian music and lyrics in a modern composition sung rap-style. If you’re interested in hearing something new, this is about as different and new as you’re going to get, fresh off the Intertubes! Bonus if you can read the lyrics in Mongolian ;-), which is apparently written using Cyrillic characters in order to get as close to the original language’s pronunciation as they can. It’s a relic of the Russian conquest of Mongolia long ago (kind of making up for the Mongolian conquest of Russia earlier), and as someone who can still (barely) remember his Russian classes from college, kind of jarring to (try to)read and hear. In so many ways it’s a mirror of how the Roman alphabet was eventually used in all the other languages in Europe, or how Chinese characters became Korean and Japanese.
Anyway, the performers in this video are D. Bold (Дуучин Болд) and Rokit Bay, the song is “Myth of Cloud”, and I think it’s pretty neat, I hope someone else listens and agrees!
Enjoy! (see further down for the official music video)