Sakha, or Yakutia, is a land of mammoths, gold and diamonds: a Siberian territory that sits atop permafrost and is home to the coldest inhabited place on earth. The size of India, it has a population of barely a million. Each of these three albums comes with a beautifully illustrated booklet mixing photography heavy on nature with original art. The Khatylaevs have, since the 90s, been part of a movement to revive Sakha music, travelling the Sakha Republic to collect songs and memories of instruments, then adding their knowledge of music of the region to reconstruct ensembles and repertoires. Arctic Spirit takes regional practices such as algys blessings, olonkho epic storytelling and shamanic singing styles. A children's chorus on one track relates a story about the reindeer hunter in a distant forest. Claudia's vocals include throat singing and glottal and palatal stops, and both singers imitate horses and birds. German provides most of the instrumentation via skilful overdubbing, including fiddles, bass, percussion and the khomus (Jew's harp). Occasionally real horses provide a supplementary soundtrack.

The khomus is the national instrument of Sakha, and Spiridon Spiridonovich Shishigin is one of its most celebrated exponents. He never uses the animal calls or vocalisations so popular with recent bands such as Ayarkhaan, but he has a richly complex melodic spectrum nevertheless, employing subtle techniques such as damping the khomus’ tongue. His album is carefully constructed around a poem by the Sakha philosopher Alexey Kulakovsky, and evokes the tundra, water, horses and the ysyakh summer solstice celebration. A subtitle nods to his recent work in therapy, both in Europe and Siberia, in which the spiritual ancestry of the khomus comes to the fore.

Ilya Zhirkov is Shishigin's nephew and Genius Loci is also heavy on the khomus, recorded in the Jura mountains on the western edge of the Alps and given a rich atmospheric backdrop. Vocals are contributed by the edgy avant-garde singer Zarina Kopyrina. Without any other instruments, Genius Loci comes across as a pure rendition of music from the land of rivers and mountains, horses and heroes.