This lofty fusion concept sounded strange at first, but once I got used to the idea, the theory behind it started to solidify and make good sense. Modern dance and trance music is all about layers and, indeed, so is overtone singing: where an electronic producer might layer sounds of whistles over chugging bass lines, the Tuvans do both at once with just their voices.

Once I wrapped my brain around the concept, I realized that the goodness or badness of the project was going to be about nothing more than the execution. One of my favorite things about Tuvan music is that it's got such terroir... a sense of place hidden in the sound of the music that is so real you can almost taste it. I worried that electronic elements would remove those subtle touches that make the music so special, washing it out like so much placeless modern music.

Turns out, all of my worry (which really only lasted the length of time it took me to unwrap the CD and to get iTunes booted up) was for naught. Eternal is a cool record. I mean, seriously cool. It's smart, it's well-produced, it balances the urbane and the earthly in a deft and clever way, and every piece comes together as though it were meant to be. Rizzo uses the Huun Huur Tu's voices and instruments as the building blocks for rich, textural compositions that fit into both the world music and electronic categories with ease and grace... a further reminder that "categories" are on the way out across the musical spectrum.

Eternal's opening track is "Ancestors Call." Now, at first it seemed to be a call that no ancestor would recognize, but as I listened more carefully, I could hear the whistling winds and galloping hoofbeats of the Central Asian plain... the terroir that I was looking for. As the record moves through from song to song, it becomes more apparent that this is far from a novelty schtick; in fact, the combination of old and new actually makes throat singing seem less of a charming and curious cultural oddity (as it's so often billed in the west) and more like a genre that resonates on a more universal level.

Highlights of Eternal include the opener, "Ancestors Call," the lengthy and jammy instrumental interlude, "Dogee Mountain," and the almost exclusively throat-singing "Tuvan Prayer," which closes the album and brings it all back to the ground. It's a CD worth listening to in toto, though, as the sequencing is really intelligent and the whole thing just flows beautifully together.

Eternal was released in August of 2009 on Electrophone Records. Playing time is 40.5 minutes.