Mountains of Tongues, founded by ethnomusicologist Ben Wheeler and anthropologist Stefan Williamson-Fa, have spent the last seven years traveling across the Caucasus region making recordings and collecting examples of lesser known musical traditions. Through selected samples from their hours of field recordings, coupled with carefully curated tracks from a personal archive of collected LPs, tapes, CDs, and home VHS recordings from across the region, their live shows present a unique and vibrant take on the soundscapes and cultures of the Caucasus, highlighting the music’s diverse forms and settings and the local musicians that make all of it possible.

Whether it’s lo-fi bootlegs of Azeri guitarists, the vocal gymnastics of Gurian polyphony, blaring Yezidi woodwinds at an engagement party, auto-tuned Dagestani techno, circling Chechen Sufi rituals, or vintage Yamaha synthesizers accompany songs in isolate languages, Mountains of Tongues presents music at the intersection of the modern/traditional, the participatory/presentational, and the sacred/secular.