In any given year there are only a handful of releases that help define a genre. Those releases push its boundaries, perfect its curves, and make you think of that music, if not in a new way, at least in a refreshed way. The collaboration between Huun Huur Tu and Carmen Rizzo is just such an album, and the album is called Eternal. The title is a nice choice, because this music isn't your average western electronic music and percussion mixed with random "world" elements. These are fully sung vocal melodies, intoned against a unique version of traditional, if not a bit ghostly and haunting instrumentation.

If this music were a view, you'd see dark, but stretching clouds over a soft landscape of tan grasslands, growing on a rubble of gray slate that only occasionally works itself up into a hillside peak. It's interesting that even before seeing the album's cover, this is the scenery it generates in your head. There is something in this music that makes it necessary to envision scenes like this. Very real, but equally surreal.

Huun Huur Tu are a group who come from far eastern Russia, in a region called Tuva. It lies at the center of Asia, north of Mongolia, and it is Huun Huur Tu's Asian folk roots that are an unmistakable part of the power that this album enjoys. Their vocal melodies are often foreign to the western scale of music, and that really works well here. It creates a number of very unexpected moments, pitching from heavenly tranquility to deep and dirty guttural chants, and at times, doing both at the same time. The same influences that guide the overwhelmingly dense, Buddhist droning chants are at play here.

Just when you think you've heard it all, an album like this comes along to remind you, music is so often like a sunset. The same ingredients come together every day in altogether awe-inspring ways. Sometimes you can expect what you'll see, but other times, you're force to just sit and stare. Eternal is a fusion of music you don't often have a chance to experience.