EVERY GENRE PROJECT - January 23 - Kyrgyz Traditional Music

Genre of the Day - Kyrgyz Traditional Music

Album of the Day - The Voice of Kyrgyzstan by Salamat Sadikova (2002)

I feel like today’s album held an unexpected amount of significance for a few reasons. First and foremost, out of all 23!! 23!!! albums I have listened to for this project, this is the first one credited to a female artist. That’s insane, and especially for me because I feel like in general my listening is just generally skewed towards female artists. If one were to calculate this ratio as a percentage, it would be less than 5% of the top albums of a genre being credited to a female artist on RYM. I don’t know if this speaks more to general underrepresentation of female music that is concealed by our extremely choice-modeled streaming economy, or a fault of RYM’s scorers rating female artists marginally lower, perhaps without even realizing. It’s probably a mix of both. But that’s insane to take in, and a reminder of how far all of music needs to go in appreciating and sponsoring women’s musical work. 

This is also probably the first album in about a week with a major emphasis on vocals, and the beauty of the human voice, no matter your lack of understanding of the language. Salamat Sadikova is considered the voice of the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan (beautiful flag), and apparently definitively enough to be crowned with an album title. It’s not difficult to see why. Her voice is so good that I was especially impressed when I found out the lute played throughout the first 17 songs was her accompanying herself, as the lute melodies are often just as complicated as the melodies she deftly weaves with her voice. Additionally, this album is a stark reminder of how important music was in transitioning societies across the USSR following its dissolution, from the Singing Revolution that helped kick start growing independence efforts in the Baltic states to Central Asia, where being a source of musical beauty was not just an artistic point of honor, but a wellspring of national pride. As an international relations/music industry student, this is the type of crossover that is so fascinating to me. 

This album, as I’m finding many showcases of regional music, is quite a long issue, clocking in at over 70 minutes and 19 tracks. Most of the titles concern missing home, whether the nation of Kyrgyzstan itself or wistful songs about village life, and tend to oscillate between more mournful, plaintive melodies and genuinely some of the most uplifting, sunny—without being cloying—music I have heard. My mood too has been oscillating all day between resolute calmness and abject disconsolateness, so it was nice to hear that lightly in musical form. Her voice is the centerpiece of the album, though, as instrumentally it’s quite sonically homogenous—the vast majority of tracks feature solely the komuz, the Kyrgyz lute, with her voice laid bare to appreciate. I appreciated how crisp the recording sounds here—its clarity allows the listener to take in the emotional richness of her voice that much more. The vocals on “Gulgun Jash” simply stopped me in my tracks—there’s listening to a track, and then there’s being grabbed and pulled by it. Her voice is agile but full, clear but deeply rooted. I liked too that the album helped expose a brief vignette of other Kyrgyz styles with other instruments towards the end of the album, but if the last 2 tracks were gone, I don’t think this album would suffer. I really feel this has to be heard to be appreciated, and that simple words can’t do the synergy of that voice and her virtuosic lute playing true justice.