Shamanic Music - Shamanic Groups

Shamanic Groups

From the late 1980s with the loosening up of political restrictions a number of Siberian native cultures underwent a cultural renaissance, shamans began to practice openly again, and musicians formed bands drawing on shamanic traditions. Cholbon and AiTal, in Sakha/Yakutsk, Biosyntes and early Yat-Kha in Tuva fall into this category. Nevertheless the musicians involved, if sometimes unsure of their own exact role, recognized an important difference between artists using shamanic themes and shamans themselves. In the West bands began to apply the label 'shamanic' loosely to any music that might induce a trance state. This was partly due to the rarity of actual recordings of shamans' rituals. Meanwhile the British-Tuvan group K-Space developed ways of combining improvisation, electronics and experimental recording and montage techniques with the more shamanic side of Tuvan traditional music. In Hungary Vágtázó HallotKémek, the Galloping Coroners, set out under the banner of shamanpunk to use ethnographic materials as manuals on how to reach and communicate ecstatic states.