Chants du Dedans, Chants du Dehors

Hearing Meïkhâneh’s album, Chants du Dedans, Chants du Dehors (Songs from Inside, Songs from Outside), is akin to waking up in a country you don’t recognise, among customs that you cannot understand, among peoples who seem to have shaken off distances and borders to exist in one place all at once. So opening track ‘Chaque Jour Nouveau’ features the penetrating sound of self-taught singer Maria Laurent, acoustic stringed instruments from the Far and Near East, and Johanni Curtet who doubles up on his backing vocals with some impressive overtone singing throughout the album.

The trio got together in 2009, and they’ve put out two albums, including 2017’s La Silencieuse (Buda Musique), and their latest continues the mix of improvisation and wide-ranging musical travels. They’re a kind of musical singularity at a crossroads of an ‘imaginary’ folk world and world music. As well as Mongolian throat song, there are meandering Persian and pan-European folk forms finding embodiment and release in these songs, lightly performed on a range of instruments – guitar, various lutes, banjo, the Mongolian horsehead fiddle, as well as a broad range of hand percussion – zarb, daf, udu and riqq among them – all quietly detonated by Milad Pasta.