The debut single of jaw harp player ULTAN KAI tells the story of the artist’s ancestral settlement — the village of Aldoma. In the artist’s own words:
«The coast of the Sea of Okhotsk—the village of Aldoma… Once it was ancestral land, but with the arrival of Soviet power the place turned into a maintenance outpost where the reindeer herders of the Edyan clan and settlers lived side by side. Long before the outpost was established, my grandmother Anna was born here and grew up among reindeer and the blue sea, but by telegram she was sent North to work as a teacher of her native language in Evenkia.
Grandmother told
stories of her childhood—she remembered the Russo-Japanese War, diving
for seaweed, herding reindeer, running from a bear, being scolded for
not feeding the fire, climbing a cliff to reach a sacred tree—praying
and tying ritual ribbons. Now Aldoma no longer exists. A couple of years
before my grandmother passed away, for her anniversary we traveled to
our ancestral land, and she sat there for a long time with her sister.
Together they silently cried for several hours…»
Available on all streaming platforms