Another discovery I owe to the blog Invisible Oranges, Tengger Cavalry is a one-man band from Beijing that combines death metal and Mongolian folk music: “Tengger” is a sky god worshipped by ancient Turkic peoples as well as the name of a desert in Inner Mongolia. The IO post I’ve linked to focuses on 2010’s Blood Sacrifice Shaman (and you should definitely listen to the two songs embedded there), but Tengger Cavalry released two more albums on Dying Art in November 2011: Sunesu Cavalry and the mostly acoustic The Mantra.
Philip Montoro has been an editorial employee of the Reader since 1996 and its music editor since 2004. Pieces he has edited have appeared in Da Capo’s annual Best Music Writing anthologies in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011. He shared two Lisagor Awards in 2019 for a story on gospel pioneer Lou Della Evans-Reid and another in 2021 for Leor Galil's history of Neo, and he’s also split three national awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia: one for multimedia in 2019 for his work on the TRiiBE collaboration the Block Beat, and two (in 2020 and 2022) for editing the music writing of Reader staffer Leor Galil. Philip has played scrap metal in Lozenge, drummed with the Disasters, the Afflictions, and Brilliant Pebbles, and sung for the White Outs. He wrote the column Beer and Metal from 2012 till 2015, and hopes to do so again one day. You can also follow him on Twitter.
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