I often recycled interviews I’d done for other outlets into longer pieces, so it was easy, under-the-table money—literally, he’d hand me stacks of RMB in hot pot restaurants. The Brooklyn band Au Revoir Simone, who played one show in Beijing, ended up on the cover, and so did Hanggai, a great Chinese folk band that played in New York on Sunday during an all-too-short visit. Hurcha, the frontman, wore an amazing studded vest that accommodated his considerable belly.
I was going to repost the old article here, but then I took another look at the piece and remembered the editor’s one requirement—stories should be 1,000 words or more to take up enough space in the magazine.
So here’s a streamlined (and admittedly still a little dry and encyclopedic) version of my piece on Hanggai.
"I was born in a small city surrounded in grasslands and herdsmen families. When I was a little boy my parents and grandparents sang a lot of beautiful songs," says Ilchi, who moved to Beijing with his parents when he was an adolescent and started a rock band in his late teens. "The longer I was separated from my homeland, the more I yearned for the grasslands."
In 2003, Ilchi and guitarist Xu Jingchen started returning to Inner Mongolia to study the native musical traditions. "My music began transforming from rap-metal [of my first band, T9] to blending Mongolian music and rock," remembers Ilchi. "At first, the combination of traditional music and rock didn't work that well so the most direct and best way was to return to Mongolian music."
They began learning to play traditional instruments as well as a technique called throat-singing, in which a singer can make more than one note at the same time. Eventually, Ilchi gathered more ethnic Mongolian musicians based in Beijing and formed Hanggai, a band in which he sings some of the songs and plays a variety of string instruments.
In the summer of 2007, a British label released Hanggai's first CD, Introducing Hanggai. A beautiful collection of modern Mongolian songs, the album won the band raves from outlets like The Guardian, the BBC, and the indie-rock website Pitchfork. "In that album, we stuck to the traditional style and added to it some new arrangements of guitar, bass, and percussion," says Ilchi.
Playing small clubs in Beijing, they became a popular live band, donning Mongolian outfits—"The costumes are convenient for riding horses," explains Ilchi—to perform. While there’s serious talent in the act, their live shows also quickly earned a reputation for being a lot of fun—the kind of music you can drink and dance the night way to. With galloping rhythms, there’s an affinity to traditional Irish music and bluegrass.
As the band's songwriting progressed, they began adding back in more Western elements. Today, the music features an eclectic mix of taobuxuur (two-stringed lute), morin khuur (horse-head fiddle), cow and horse bells, Buddhist bells, a shaman drum, vintage four-string banjo, sanxian (three-stringed lute), guitar, bass, and a customized jazz drum kit.
"I never thought the music would developed into what it is today," says Ilchi, who cites bands like Pink Floyd and the Secret Machines as important influences. He and some of his bandmates still return to places in Inner Mongolia when they have a chance to meet herding families and listen to their songs.
Last year, they recorded again, with new songs and more mature versions of the tracks from their first album, creating He Who Travels Far. Put out by the Dutch record label World Connection, it was produced by Ken Stringfellow, who has played with The Posies, REM, and Big Star, and Dutch musician JB Meijers.
Although Hanggai borrows from modern and traditional music, Ilchi makes clear preserving the Mongolian traditions is his priority. Many of the younger Mongolians he meets are fans of Mandopop, but some of them get inspired to do something similar after hearing the band. "As time goes by, I feel more and more responsibility to protect the culture,” he says.
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