Squama regulars Enji and Popp join forces on ‘Nant’, the debut LP by their newly minted duo ‘Poeji’, transcending the confines of Post-Dub and Downtempo. 2022’s 3-track EP ‘031921 5.24 5.53’, released as a limited run of dubplates, was the first testament to their open approach to writing, which takes only very basic ideas and relies on non-verbal communication to define form and pace. Enji’s vocals are less centre-stage than on her solo endeavors, piercing through reverb plates and guitar pedals while Simon inked his signature set of wooden and metal percussions with chains of tape echoes and analog delay. Listening to ‘Nant’ as a snapshot of Poeji’s artistry at a certain time and place can instill a sense of gratitude within the listener that something so fleeting can be captured.


Written by Enkhjargal Erkhembayar and Simon Popp
Recorded by Tobias Ober at Bonello Studio Berlin
Mastered by Martin Ruch
Mixed and Produced by Martin Brugger
Photography by Lara Fritz and Hanne Kaunicnik at Studio CNP
Styling by Laura Fries and Carolin Schreck at FRECK
Creative Direction and Design by Maximilian Schachtner
Supported by Initiative Musik gGmbH with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media
©℗ 2024 Squama

  • The Guardian

    09.08.24
    Atmospheric work that masterfully treads the line between ambience and free jazz expression.

    Mongolian singer Enji’s latest release sees her collaborate with experimental jazz drummer Simon Popp as Poeji. Their debut album Nant (Squama) highlights the agility of Enji’s voice, percussively matching Popp’s textural drumming to create atmospheric work that masterfully treads the line between ambience and free jazz expression.

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  • Songlines Magazine

    10.09.24
    This debut work by new collaboration Poeji gets under your skin and stays there

    At once calming and unsettling, meditative yet intentionally disquieting, this debut work by new collaboration Poeji gets under your skin and stays there. A duo comprised of Mongolian jazz and ceremonial singer Enji and the ever-experimental German drummer Simon Popp, both leaders in their respective avantgarde f ields, their freeform creations f loat on a bed of spacious, spaced-out invention informed by everything from dub and traditional Mongolian singing to the raw electro-acoustic found sounds of musique concrète. Vocals and percussion are the main instruments on this album, with Enji’s voice weaving between anything-goes jazz vocalese and tremulous and melismatic urtyn duu long-song, as she’s done in previous solo recordings including 2023’s also Squama-released and acclaimed Ulaan [a Top of the World in Songlines #191]. But where that record’s original songs came buoyed by bass, drums, guitars and f lute, Nant’s otherworldly soundscape is furnished more sparsely by a solitary drum kit deployed with coiled minimalism, and a steel tongue drum whose visceral wallop lends gasp-inducing texture to what feels like a brave new shadow world.

  • Electronic Sound

    21.08.24
    Genuinely distinctive and oddly mesmeric

    As Poeji, Mongolian Jazz vocalist Enji and German experimental drummer Simon Popp are devoting themselves to „creating music without borders or constraints" They have certainly achieved that on their debul 'Nant", which uses Popp's Instinctive rhythms and Enji's intimate, abstract vocals to create free-flowing avant-gard pieces. Inspired by dub, downtempo and musique concrete, the tracks here are both genuinely distinctive and oddly mesmeric, and the more you hear boundary-pushing pieces like 'ybbs', the more you find yourself being pulled into this pair's wonderfully idiosyncretic world.

  • Monolith Cocktail

    12.08.24
    In shrouded chambers polygenesis cultures and roots cross paths and open up an amorphous portal to a unique world of redolent Asian percussion and Mongolian “urtyn duu” vocal soundings.

    Making good on their cryptically coordinate-like coded 031921 5.24 5.53 EP from 2022, German drummer extraordinaire Simon Popp and the Ulaanbaatar born vocalist Enkhjargal Erkhembayar (shortened to Enji) have combined their individual disciplines and scope of influences to venture even further into uncharted territory.

    For his part, the Bavarian Popp uses an extensive apparatus of hand drums and worldly sourced percussion to conjure up an atmosphere of both atonal and rhythmic (sometimes verging on a break or two) West Africa, Tibet, gamelan Indonesia and Japan. This in turn evokes a transmogrified vague sense of the avant-garde, of Kabuki theatre, of Shinto and Buddhist mysticism and mystery.

    Popp’s collaborative foil Enji is a scion of the old Mongolian tradition of the Long song, a form of singing that emphasis and extends each syllable of text for long stretches of time. It’s said that a song with only ten actual words can last hours. Strong on the symbolism of the Mongolians much dependable horse, the long song form can be philosophical, religious, romantic or celebratory. Now, in a different century, Enji channels this heritage to voice, utter, accent, assonant, woo, and like breathing onto a cold glassy surface, exhales the diaphanous, gauzy, ached and comforting – the truly mysterious hummed ‘Buuwein Duu’ sounds like a lullaby.

    Although much of the wording is linked to those roots, there’s an ambiguity to much of the carrying style vocals. For instance, the duo’s appellation of Poeji was chosen because it can be translated into various languages: meaning “sing” in Slovenian and roughly “poetry” in Japanese. The album title, Nant, is itself old Welsh in derivation, and can be translated as both “stream” and “valley”.

    A fourth world dialect is achieved; a communication that needs no prior knowledge or understanding as the meaning is all in the delivery, emotion the cadence and largely extemporized feels and mood of the moment.

    Described as working in the vernacular of post-dub and the downtemp, Nant reminded me in parts of the “tropical concrete” of the Commando Vanessa label pairing of Valentina Magaletti and Marlene Riberio, Hatis Noit, Steve Reich and Werner “Zappi” Diermaier’s various drumming experiments as part of the faUSt duo with fellow original Faustian Jean Harve-Pèron. It is a unique conjuring of tones, textures, atmospheres, the avant-garde, the spontaneous (wherever the mood takes them) and the esoteric that won’t scare the horses. Instead, it sets a wispy, shrouded course to ventures into new realms of improvised communication; a bridging of cultures that reaches into new spheres of worldliness and the realms of new dimensions.

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  • Poeji


    Poeji is the convergence of two musical minds, a new project formed of vocalist Enji and drummer Simon Popp. Both progressive and acclaimed in their own rights, in coming together as a duo, stripped back to just percussion and vocals, the pair found a deep chemistry. Crafting an output of experimental, textural and otherworldly music which pulls inspiration from German avant-garde, dub, downtempo and musique concrete. Their largely improvisational, emotionally instinctive compositions have been captured on their debut album ‘Nant’, releasing on 26 July via Squama Recordings.

    • Nant

      180g vinyl, laser cut OBI strip in three varying colorways

      € 25