Sainkho Namtchylak The Shamanic Voice Between Worlds

Most listeners have never heard a voice like hers. Ethereal and elemental, capable of producing multiple pitches simultaneously, Sainkho Namtchylak’s voice seems to emerge from the folds of the Earth itself. For over three decades, she has defied conventional boundaries, cultural, musical and geographic ones, carving a singular path as one of the world’s most remarkable vocal artists and sonic explorers. Her work is a confluence of ancient tradition, contemporary improvisation, spiritual inquiry, and deep listening.

Sainkho was born in the remote Siberian region of Tuva, a Russian republic nestled between Mongolia and the vast Siberian taiga. Isolated by geography and preserved through centuries of nomadic culture, Tuva is home to one of the world’s most unique musical traditions: throat singing, or khoomei. Unlike Western singing techniques, Tuvan throat singing involves producing two or more tones at once, a low fundamental drone and a series of overtones that resonate above it like whispers from another world. These songs often imitate the sounds of nature like wind, water, animal calls and are intimately tied to Tuvan shamanic cosmology, in which sound serves as both communication and invocation.

Traditionally a male-dominated art form, throat singing was for centuries considered unsuitable for women, believed to pose spiritual or even physical risks. Sainkho became the first Tuvan woman to perform these techniques professionally. Her training, first at the Ippolitov-Ivanov Music College in Kyzyl, then at the Gnesin Institute in Moscow, brought her into contact with not only her own shamanic and Lamaist vocal heritage, but also with the experimental and contemporary currents flowing through Soviet and later European music.

Her rise was rapid. A breakthrough performance at a pan-Siberian folk competition in 1986 introduced her distinctive voice to international audiences. Between 1987 and 1989, she toured widely across the globe from Spain to the Philippines, the U.S. to Australia, presenting traditional Tuvan songs while simultaneously beginning to experiment with new musical forms. This experimentation would become a lifelong signature. By the 1990s, Sainkho was collaborating with free jazz musicians, avant-garde composers, and improvisers across Europe, stretching her vocal technique into wholly uncharted territory.

Her 1998 album Naked Spirit became a defining work, an expansive, meditative blend of Tuvan tradition, jazz, and spiritual soundscape that won the prestigious Deutscher Schallplattenpreis in Germany. In 2001, Stepmother City marked her first artistic journey to Italy, presenting a more accessible, though still deeply experimental, vocal language. And in 2023, she released Where Water Meets Water: Bird Songs & Lullabies, a stunning collaboration with Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan. Recorded live without overdubs on the abandoned islands of the Venetian lagoon, the album captures pure improvisation in haunted, resonant spaces, each track a spontaneous dialogue between body, breath, echo, and environment.

Yet Sainkho is more than a vocalist. She is a poet, performance artist, and painter. Her recent visual projects include Calligraphy of Sound, in which she paints with brush and ink while vocalizing, creating large-scale silk works that trace the invisible movement of voice through space. Painting Music Scores, another ongoing collection, transforms abstract visual forms into guides for improvised singing. Her artistic universe is multi-sensory, multi-dimensional, and deeply rooted in the unseen.

Today, Sainkho is based primarily in China, where she teaches, performs, and continues to create. Her recent travels have taken her from art residencies in Mongolia to film projects in the Italian Alps, and most recently to Rome, where she performed a solo vocal concert at the Basilica of San Giorgio al Velabro.

In this intimate and far-ranging interview, conducted for Red Eye Magazine, Sainkho reflects on the spiritual power of voice, the deep potential of throat singing, the ancient wisdom encoded in ritual sound, and her cautious curiosity about artificial intelligence. What becomes clear is that for Sainkho, sound is expression and communion. It is a way of listening to the world, to memory, to energy, and to the mystery that lies between breath and silence.

Gloria Maria Cappelletti: Sainkho, your voice carries something ancient and almost otherworldly. I’d like to start with your practice of throat singing and overtone chanting. How did you begin working with these vocal techniques, and do you consider them to have healing power on the body or the mind?

Sainkho Namtchylak: There are two types of singing I work with diphonic singing, which some call overtone singing, and throat singing. The first one, diphonic singing, is more connected to Buddhist traditions. It’s slow, mantra-like, meditative. You control the drone, and at the same time, you produce high whistling tones, kind of like a flute inside your body.

Throat singing is very ancient and comes from shamanic traditions. It’s connected with nature like wind, rivers, birds, animals. You imitate those sounds, but not just to sound like them. You become them. The idea was always to connect with the spirit of the thing, river, wind, wolf, whatever.

About healing, yes, maybe. But I don’t want to say it like that. I think it depends on the person, how they feel. Some people feel healing, others feel nothing. It’s very subjective. There are people who feel it very strongly, but it’s not because I want to heal them. I just sing. I concentrate only on sound. I don’t think about emotion. I don’t put emotional power into the voice. I just go with the sound itself.

GMC: That really aligns with how I experience your work, especially something like Lost Rivers Song. When I heard it, I felt it was an expression of humanity and Nature at a very deep, spiritual level. And it led me to wonder: now that we are interacting more with AI and digital technologies, what do you feel we must protect to stay human?

SN: You said we created AI. It’s a new creature, like a child. We have thousands of years of evolution, biological, molecular. We developed ways of exchanging information beyond words. We feel things. We exchange energy. We imagine. This kind of multidimensional perception people sometimes call it "spirit" or "god" or whatever, this is what created art, music, ceremonies.

Even meditation, it’s not just relaxation, it’s a way to clear the mind, reach this emptiness, and from there something creative comes. AI doesn’t do this. AI gives you what you ask for. Sometimes it gives you something unexpected, but still from the same digital pool. It’s just a huge summation of everything digitized, organized to give answers, perspectives, hints. But it’s not like us.

GMC: Do you think AI can evolve into something we can have a deeper exchange with? Or is it limited to this utilitarian framework?

SN: It’s too early. People don’t yet know how to work with it, and the programs don’t yet know how to talk to people. It's all consuming and experimental, like little kids pushing buttons to see what happens.

And AI is a machine, it records everything, even mistakes. That’s dangerous. If you don’t know how to use it, it’s like meeting a very clever but dangerous animal. If you make a wrong move it might react. Not emotionally, but the reaction can affect you emotionally. The answer might be correct, but the emotional effect can be strange. We’re not yet on the level to have real contact. It’s still too open, too raw.

GMC: So much of AI is trained for commercial purposes, it’s not focused on nourishing perception, but on productivity and efficiency.

SN: Yes. It’s not about truth. Everyone wants to perform, to be the best. There’s too much noise. People are lost. But this is our nature, we love new toys. We love pressing buttons. But we must be careful. Because the machine is clever, and it can learn. But it needs time, and we need time. It’s the first time this kind of contact is happening on such a mass level. It’s historic, but we’re still just at the beginning.

GMC: I’d like to switch into your visual art practice for a moment. You’ve been developing a fascinating body of multimedia work, can you tell us about it?

SN: I have two main collections. One is Calligraphy of Sound. I use silk, ink, and a big brush. While I make sound, sing or improvise, I follow the movements of my voice with my body, and with my brush on silk. It's like drawing sound. I created large silk works, and I’m looking for a gallery to exhibit them.

The other is called Painting Music Scores. It's based on the idea of visual scores, not the classical five lines, but more like abstract images. These are for voice improvisation. I have 24 of them, and each one comes with a vinyl recording of me performing the score.

I also made a catalog, about 100 pages, but I want to make it 200, includes lyrics, poems, my biography, discography, exhibitions, scores, everything. It’s like a documentation of my life and art. I want to finalize it now, I'm turning 70 soon. It’s time.

GMC: You’ve lived in Europe for decades, and now you’re reconnecting with Asia. What brought on this return?

SN: After 30 years in Europe, I started looking more toward Asia. I went to Mongolia, to China. Mongolia was hard, but good. I created The Lost Rivers Project with a curator named Gantulya. She helped me so much, we worked in yurts, invited artists, musicians. It was real. No hotels, just tents and wind and earth.

In China, life is very different. Not always organized like in Austria or Germany. Sometimes it feels like the USSR again, half-official, half-wild. You don’t know if something is really happening until the last moment. But people help. Even if you’re not famous, if you’re in trouble, they find ways to support you. It’s beautiful. They ask, “Is she eating? Is she warm?” They take care of you. They don’t let you starve. This was very touching for me.

GMC: That sense of care and reciprocity seems central to your entire practice across cultures, disciplines, technologies.

SN: Yes. I often say: the artist is like an endless warrior. Not just fighting for creativity, but also for survival. We solve problems. We keep going. You have to adapt, be flexible. You meet new questions, new tools, like AI, like different cultures, and you try to stay awake, to stay honest.

Interview by: Gloria Maria Cappelletti
Cover Image: Courtesy of the Artist Sainkho Namtchylak
Special Thanks: Our deepest thanks to Sainkho Namtchylak for her time, generosity, and powerful presence. Special gratitude to Alessio de Navasques for making this connection possible.
Video Material: Courtesy of the Artist and YouTube.
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