ON THE ROAD TO SIBERIA

Friday, June 29, 2007
A 10:30 PM flight from Moscow lands us in Siberia at dawn in the city of Abakan. A waiting van with a grumpy driver takes all of us – the four members of Huun Huur Tu, their two managers Sasha and Volodya, Lu from the Damned, and me. Two documentary film crew guys are also aboard; a tall serious Moscow Film Institute grad named Pasha intently studying the instruction manual on his brand-new Canon DV; and his buddy Vladik, the shorter of the Mutt & Jeff team festooned with a variety of still cameras and lenses, whose long blond hair and big dark sunglasses are constantly getting in the way of his focus. Everybody is smoking furiously.

Some of us are still toasted from last night’s all-nighter which began at a club called 16 Tons (“…and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt”). Lu was backing up Geoffrey Oryema, the Paris-based Ugandan singer-songwriter (http://www.myspace.com/geoffreyoryema ).

Oryema’s guitarist had somehow failed to show up for the gig, so Lu sat in. Joined by a local blues harmonica enthusiast, they rocked a packed house. After the triumph, we taxied across town to a club whose habitués reputedly included a mix of Russia’s top oligarch billionaires and avant garde artistes. Located in a warehouse district, the joint was unfortunately not exactly jumping. The action consisted mainly of scantily clad cigarette girls jiving to the deafening techno offering fistfuls of some new brand, and laid back pot-heads puffing away in the rear garden. We decamped to the nearby flat of the club’s owner, a yuong Russian artist who used to live in LA and is sort of on the lam here after he was caught up in the great Stone Canyon pot bust a few years back. We spent the remaining hours until dawn drinking tea, discussing music, Malevich and Constructivism like a bunch of 1920’s Bolsheviks – just as I’ve always imagined life in Moscow.

But now the sun is coming up over the pine-fringed ridges and as we head down the road southeast toward the Sayan mountains, Kaigal-ool begins to hum a tune in a melodious vibrato, a confluence of notes and tones known as throat-singing. In five or six hours we will be in Tuva on the other side of those mountains and home for Huun Huur Tu.