Songs of the Gobi meet new sounds

Indie musician Eder grew up between two worlds, though he didn't realize it at the time.

One was Hohhot, the bustling capital of North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, where life moved in familiar urban rhythms.

The other was Ereenhot, a border town on the China-Mongolia frontier where his grandmother lived. It was there, during long summer and winter vacations, that he first encountered the vastness that would later define his music.

The nearby Gobi Desert landscapes of Ereenhot were not beautiful in a postcard sense. It was flat, dry and harsh. The horizon seemed to slice the sky from the earth. There was little vegetation — only wind, stone and a silence so complete it felt almost physical.

But to young Eder, it was something else entirely.

"It felt tough," Eder recalls. "Not a place of abundance, but of survival. Animals, plants, even insects — they all felt strong because they had to be."

In the Gobi, he and his cousin, both under 10, would disappear into the open land for entire days. There were no adults, no supervision, no schedules, and no destination. They watched clouds move across the sky like slow cinema, chased lizards and grasshoppers, and spotted camels, Mongolian gazelles and eagles riding the wind above them.

Nothing ever felt dull. Time simply slipped away. Back in the city, however, everything felt different.

That contrast — between vast silence and the bustle of urban life — quietly shaped his inner world long before he became a musician.

His grandmother passed away when he was in middle school, and the trips to Ereenhot stopped. The Gobi became a memory rather than a place. But it never left him.

In 2013, he launched the Gobi Project, and in 2024, he released his debut album, titled From the Gobi.

This year, Eder's music will reach a wider audience. The upcoming Strawberry Music Festival, one of the country's largest outdoor music events, will debut in Hohhot on Saturday and Sunday. Performing with other musicians, Eder will present tracks from From the Gobi, including Traveling From East to West, Plain Under the Night Sky and Onon Riverside, alongside unreleased material.

Eder says the project was never meant to be a fixed band. Instead, it was a creative space where collaboration took precedence over structure.

Blending raw traditional folk music with modern electronic sounds, the album grew from ideas accumulated over the past decade. Some compositions date back to 2014, before being revisited and completed in 2024. Musicians he had known for years returned to improvise over old sketches, including the acclaimed Tuvan ensemble Alash and Chinese folk-rock band Hanggai.

"Bands are unstable," he says. "This way, I could work with anyone — singers, khoomei (throat singing) performers, morin khuur players, saxophonists, trumpet players, people from anywhere."

The Gobi Project became a rotating constellation of voices: long-song singers from both China and Mongolia, Tuvan khoomei vocalists, experimental jazz musicians, electronic producers, and traditional instrumentalists from around the world.

Eder describes the Strawberry Music Festival performance as a journey in which, as he puts it, "each audience member creates their own version of it".

Visuals will be central to the experience — real-time generative imagery, 3D transformations, digital painting, and live interaction between sound and image. With a background in animation and visual art, Eder treats the stage as a hybrid space between a concert and an art installation.

Some tracks invite the audience to dance. Others will unfold like cinematic landscapes. There is no fixed narrative — only movement.

"His soundscape masterfully merges electronic production with traditional Mongolian folk music — refined, grand, yet brimming with contemporary flair and modern chic. Visually, he seamlessly combines ethnic motifs with his distinctive approach to animated storytelling. This cross-medium artistic expression feels complete and strikingly powerful," says Hiimorit, a musician born and raised in the Xiliin Gol League in Inner Mongolia, who teaches khoomei and morin khuur at Minzu University of China.

Hiimorit worked with Eder on his debut album and will join him onstage at the Strawberry Music Festival.

"This open-minded approach encourages unrestricted collaboration, allowing every work to breathe and evolve organically," Hiimorit adds.

At 40, Eder's journey did not begin in a conservatory or classroom. It began in his father's cassette collection.

His parents were not musicians. His mother painted traditional Chinese ink works, while his father worked in public service and had a deep love of music. Their home was filled with tapes of classical music and recordings from around the world — saxophones, trumpets, piano concertos, and orchestral works.

For Eder, it was music without language. "I didn't understand lyrics," he says. "So I understood music as pure sound." He listened to classical pieces like Turkish March, symphonic recordings, and jazz without thinking about genres. Music was never something to categorize. It was simply something to experience.

Then came a neighbor's guitar.

A childhood friend bought a wooden guitar, and something clicked. By fourth grade, Eder had bought his own instrument and began teaching himself. In middle school, he joined a guitar class where he was introduced to electric guitar and, for the first time, the structure of different musical genres.

Around him, the internet was just beginning to take hold. Music was still physical — CDs, tapes, shared files. That limitation, he says, proved formative. It forced attention, repetition, and deep listening.

By high school, he was already forming bands and experimenting with punk, metal and hip-hop. He taught himself drums, bass, rhythm, and arrangement. Everything was built from the ground up.

Although Mongolian music surrounded his childhood through folk songs, traditional instruments and family gatherings, it did not immediately shape his artistic direction.

"I didn't care much about it at the time," he admits. "I was more into what felt modern — skate culture, electronic music and rap."

Like many young artists, he first looked outward. It wasn't until university that he began looking back.

Studying animation in Changchun, Jilin province, at the Jilin Animation Institute, Eder slowly rediscovered the music of his roots — not out of obligation, but curiosity. Later, as a teacher at Inner Mongolia University and eventually as a full-time independent artist, he began merging what had once felt separate: traditional Mongolian music, global electronic sounds, visual art, and street culture.

He also founded a fashion brand Wuvnen (a Mongolian term signifying sincerity, purity and unspoiled authenticity, reflecting the undiluted spirit of steppe nomadic culture) that reflected the same hybrid language. What emerged was not a return to tradition, but a reassembly of identity.

Ilchi, vocalist and founding member of Hanggai, has collaborated with Eder for more than a decade. He recalls a creative partnership spanning music and fashion.

"He designed Hanggai's multicolor logos and a full line of streetwear, including printed T-shirts and ethnic robes, which quickly sold out during our tour," says Ilchi. Their collaboration also extended to Eder's debut album, which featured a remixed version of the song Flower.

Even chance found its way into the creative process.

One recording session took place in a garage after a late-night studio session. A long-song singer from Mongolia, Narandulam, began humming spontaneously in the underground parking space. The natural reverb of concrete transformed her voice into something almost cinematic. They returned the next day to record the performance properly, and that unexpected moment later became the foundation for a new song.

Eder is drawn to natural sounds — wind recorded on location; insects at night, crackling fire and the open desert air. These field recordings are woven into seamless compositions that flow from one track to the next.

"I prefer sounds that already feel timeless," Eder notes.