Remember the grand entrance of Shirley MacLaine at the Academy Awards, when she descended from the rafters in a space ship? She is well known for her firm spiritual beliefs in reincarnation. Her books are very courageous, if controversial collections of paranormal personal experiences and observations that leave much of the public rolling their eyes. Being fully aware of this reaction, she poked fun at herself. And ‘endeared’ so many more to her in the process.
So, here it is 2011. I’ve always been fond of aliens. And from my experience as an overtone singer over the past two decades, I’ve felt like one myself. Overtone singing has yet to enter the mainstream. Even the awareness of such a thing existing has moved at a snail’s pace. My hat goes off to the Mongolian throat singing national treasure Hosoo, who was brave enough to go on a German ‘who’s got talent’ competition. In his debut performance, the looks on the faces of the audience were priceless: dumbfounded, eyebrows furled, jaws dropping and general confusion. His presence in such a popular phenomenon as these talent shows was testament to his confidence and vision to present throat singing to the world at large. We in the overtone singing community applaud Hosoo for his bravery.
Hosoo (also known as Khosbayar, with his instrumental partner Zolzayar) did go on to the semi-finals, performing Amazing Grace and a pop tune (by one of the judges). That certainly was an effective way to cinch their admiration. Watch it here.
I can relate somewhat, given an experience from my past while I was living in Tokyo. This was around 1991. I had a small group of overtone singers that got together every once and a while to jam on a rooftop. Prime time TV news got wind of this and decided to do a spot on us. For a whole day they filmed us, carted us around the city to various locations, including a park and a ‘science salon’. Here they hooked us up with electrodes to analyze our brain waves while we sang overtones as opposed to simply relaxing. When the feature aired, we saw that they had added a few elements of their own, presumably because they knew their audience. As the cameras were approaching the doorway of the house where the singing could be heard coming from, they superimposed some typical Japanese sci-fi B movie animated graphics and ‘doo, doo, doo, doo’ menacing music. A bit later, they alternately compared the singing of one of the men with a Japanese transvestite singing comedian. All in good fun. I appreciated the whole fiasco for what it was. Remember, this was way back in 1991. It’s amazing they paid any attention whatsoever to a few overtone singers.
Speaking of aliens, I created a little video with this theme in mind- The Adventures of Samson: Alien Overtone Singer.
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