NEWS: Tengger @ The Common Room

Tengger are a travelling musical family playing psychedelic New Age drone music. Originally a duo of Pan-Asian couple itta (harmonium, voice, and toy instruments) and Marqido (analogue synths) they expanded with the birth of the couple’s son RAAI, who now joins them on tour (stopping in at The Common Room in Newcastle on Friday 17^th February) and often on stage. Translated from Mongolian as ‘unlimited expanse of sky’, the band name marks this familial expansion.

The name also means ‘huge sea’ in Hungarian. Travel, as a spiritual experience in real environments, and the sound between the space and the audience have been central themes of their works, informing every aspect of their art. Their analogue pulses no different to the plasma rippling through the body and set it aloft on their own stretches of synth.

Tengger find the interconnective tissue between the Krautrock rhythms of NEU!, Can, Popul Vuh et al, and the vocal sculptures of Julianna Barwick or 70’s Kosmiche supergroup Harmonia. Managing to stitch each of their influences into the tones and pulses of their music. Layers of vocals hover ethereally above the harmonics, bringing about the kind of meditative calm that’s often attached to the New Age, but lifting themselves deliberately away from a genre often dismissed as yoga studio backing tracks and elevated into a new kind of transcendence.

Tengger play The Common Room, Newcastle on Friday 17^th February.