Hanggai and Mamer  The Chinese music scene has been transformed
by musicians from outlying provinces moving to Beijing and
updating traditional songs that have managed to survive the
country's political upheavals. This intriguing double bill of
new Chinese folk-rock-country crossover styles featured two such
bands, now trying to find a wider audience in the west.
Hanggai, the headliners, deserve to do just that, and are
recommended to any organisers of major summer festivals still
looking for totally unexpected and rousing new crowd-pleasers.
They mostly come from Inner Mongolia and arrived on stage
wearing robes and hats with pointed spikes, and are led by a
large and fearsome-looking former punk called Ilchi. If they
hadn't been swigging from beer bottles, they might have been
mistaken for the house band of some particularly ferocious far-
eastern medieval warlord.  They sounded as startling and unusual
as they looked, with Ilchi joined by two other singers
specialising in deep, growled "overtone vocals" (a