Nomad by TENGGER
It’s fitting that the latest album from TENGGER is entitled Nomad. The South Korean/Japanese couple at the core of the group have built their ethos around a life lived in thrall to the road — making yearly pilgrimages to dazzling locales, recording their music among unfamiliar cultures and environments, and in turn creating sounds imbued with a lush environmental thrum. The band considers this travel the spiritual center to their works, and that mindset is reflected in their adopted name, TENGGER, meaning “unlimited expanse of sky" in Mongolian and also “huge sea” in Hungarian. The grandeur reflected in their name radiates from every lingering note of their Earthsong sojourns. The band has harnessed and channeled a clutch of cosmic and Terran harmonics alike over their decade plus of growth — with notable releases on Guruguru Brain and Extra Noir — and now they return to Beyond Beyond is Beyond, after the success of 2019’s Spiritual 2 on BBiB, for their most enigmatic turn yet.
Dive into Nomad and there’s a feeling of constant motion. Not the rushed or hurried motion that comes from being crushed into a throng of workers on their way to a day’s wage, but a more natural sense of order and flow. Within pieces like the Krautrock-flecked “Eurasia,” the quivering opener “Achime,” and the aptly-titled closer “Flow,” the band adopts the serene sweep of trickling waters and the precise yet natural movement of molecules. They tap the pulse of plasma rippling through the body and set it aloft on their own stretches of synth. The duo finds the interconnective tissue between Neu, Popul Vuh, the vocal sculptures of Julianna Barwick, and the sunset strains of Harmonia, suturing the stitches with each influence’s most natural impulses. With layers of voice hovering above the harmonics, TENGGER bring about the kind of meditative calm that’s often attached to the New Age, but they lift the genre off of the thrift store shelves and yoga studio tape decks and elevate its bliss into a new era of Kosmiche transcendence.
