About Hanggai
Hanggai is an Inner Mongolian folk music group based in Beijing who specialize in a blend of Mongolian folk music and more modern styles such as punk rock. Their songs incorporate traditional folk lyrics as well as original compositions, and are sung in Mongolian and Mandarin.
NPR Radio states that in a country where genres such as C-pop dominate mainstream airwaves, Hanggai is making new inroads into the Chinese music industry with their modern take on Mongolian folk music. Some of the members are ethnic Mongolians while the remaining are ethnic Han who specialize in Mongolian instruments. All of the members hail from Inner Mongolia or Beijing.
The term "Hanggai" itself is a Mongolian word referring to an idealized natural landscape of sprawling grasslands, mountains, rivers, trees, and blue skies. The band was created when Ilchi, captivated by the sound of throat singing and wanting to rediscover his ethnic heritage, travelled to Inner Mongolia to learn the art. It was there that he met fellow band members Hugejiltu and Bagen. In an interview with NPR, Ilchi stated, "most of our people have moved away from the old way of life After moving to the cities, many of us have gradually been subjected to a very strong cultural invasion by an oppressive culture. So this traditional music has completely lost its space."
The members of Hanggai come from diverse backgrounds, with Ilchi having once been the front man of punk band T9. These eclectic experiences have come together to give Hanggai a unique sound, blending Mongolian folk music with more popular forms such as punk. In an interview with Spinner, Ilchi stated that among the group's many influences, Western artists such as "Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Secret Machines, Electralane and Neil Diamond" have played a large role in shaping the band's music. Although the core of their sound is based around the morin khuur and the topshur, two traditional instruments, the band also incorporates more modern sounds.
In each of their albums, the band has also made heavy use of electric guitars, computer programming, bass, and banjoes in order to create a more seamless and modern sound.
Many of the songs are adaptations of Mongolian folk songs and are sung in Mongolian incorporating throat singing, a Mongolian technique in which the artist emits two different pitches at the same time.
Part of Hanggai's goals as a musical group is to help strengthen Mongolian culture in China in fictions involved in "rediscovering cultural identity in modern China: He's an ethnic Mongolian who had to relearn the language to sing in it, and he's singing about a fast-disappearing way of life he's never really lived himself." Although many of their songs, such as Wuji, hark back to a simpler pastoral past with lyrics, such as "The beloved grasslands where I was born I will sing my praise to you for ever My beloved Mongolian homeland I will sing to you playing my banjo ", a large portion of the album itself is interjected with the sounds of Beijing street traffic speaking further to the complications of finding one's ethnic identity in the face of a more dominant mainstream culture.
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