If you’re at all on the fence about attending tonight’s AnDa Union performance, I can tell you first hand that you don’t want to miss it. I had the opportunity to see their youth performance this afternoon and was blown away – by the sounds they can produce with their voices, by the staggering realism of their nature sounds, and by the tunefulness of their music. Perhaps what impressed me the most was that the performance was so much fun.

AnDa Union’s program bills their singing as “a traditional type of Mongolian overtone singing that replicates the sound of nature.” After seeing them perform live, I can safely say that this is an understatement: there were many times during the concert where I could easily hear the neighing of horses, the wind whistling through the trees, the galloping of hundreds of hooves. Other times, I found myself surprised that, despite the group’s foreign costumes and instruments, they were extremely relatable. Their music, with its literal titles (“Drinking Song” or “Galloping Horses”), speaks to a time and place where people tend their pastures instead of their facebook feeds, coexisting with not only the environment but with each other, peacefully and happily. You can hear it in the boisterousness of the drinking song, the excitement of one thousand horses riding across the grasslands.

On top of this, I was amazed at the flexibility of their voices. Overtone singing – singing more than one note at once – is impressive on its own, but AnDa Union utilizes it to sing two distinct melodies at the same time. Many times during the performance, I caught myself searching the stage for a flutist playing the high melody, only to realize that it was a result of the lower melody being sung. The result is truly phenomenal, at once exotic and intimately familiar, and certainly time well spent.