This article continues our series exploring different ways of working with sound across creative and cultural contexts.
“ХИЙМЭЛ ОЮУН” (khii-mel o-yun)—or “XO” for short—is the Mongolian term for AI. This CPinMongolia.com logo identifies articles exploring creative practices in which imaginative minds engage with AI not as a replacement, but as a co-creator in artistic and cultural expression.
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ANGIR MOTHER
(English translation)
A distant shimmer wavers before my eyes—
Has my Angir Mother appeared?
The steady rain is falling—
Has my mother come to me in a dream?
The steady rain is falling—
Has my mother come to me in a dream?
A far-off mirage comes into focus—
Has my beloved mother appeared?
My tender heart is softening—
Has my noble mother come to me?
My tender heart is softening—
Has my noble mother come to me?
My orphaned heart longs for comfort—
Has her blessing flowed over me?
I miss her despite myself—
Has my generous mother come to me?
I miss her despite myself—
Has my generous mother come to me?
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The above translation is based on Serchmaa’s (Сэрчмаа) original 2002 recording. Lyrics: Ü. Khürelbaatar (Ү. Хүрэлбаатар) Music: L. Balkhjav (Л. Балхжав).
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Reading the Rain
Unlike my introduction to Ai Cassette’s reinterpretation of My Friend, it was not the lyrics that first drew me into Angir Mother (Ангир ижий). It was the music itself. The melody, the arrangement, and especially the vocal performance immediately held my attention. I listened to the piece several times before becoming curious about what the lyrics might reveal through closer study. Only then did I undertake a close translation of the words.
Beginning with the music rather than the words shaped how I came to understand the song. Had I started with the lyrics alone, I might have read Angir Mother simply as a song about missing one’s mother. Instead, the music prepared me for something a little more elusive.
The lyrics do not explain grief so much as dwell within it. They seem to linger in a space where memory, dreams, blessing, and longing become difficult to separate.
Written by the distinguished Mongolian poet Ü. Khürelbaatar and set to music by L. Balkhjav, Angir Mother was first recorded by the renowned Mongolian singer Serchmaa in 2002. In this recent AI-generative reinterpretation, these same words are carried by such an expressive male voice. Here, I must offer a deep nod of respect to Ai Cassette’s music producers. Their choice of virtual instruments, their arrangement and interplay, offers us such a rich listening experience. The dynamic range, spatial imaging, and transient response, in other words the sound quality, is exceptional, even through the humblest of audio speakers.
Without altering a single lyric, Ai Cassette’s YouTube “performance” allows masculine expressiveness to inhabit the song’s grief, tenderness, and longing.
Ü. Khürelbaatar’s poetic lyrics are remarkably restrained. They offer no story, no explanation, and no account of why mother is absent. Instead, they move through a sequence of familiar experiences: rain, a distant shimmer, a dream, and a tender softening of the heart.
What struck me most is that these images were not being presented as metaphors in the usual literary sense. They seemed to belong more to the lived experiences with the vast Mongolian steppe, where ever-changing weather, distant horizons, seasonal movement, and the rhythms of the natural world did, and still do, shape everyday life.
Within this landscape, angir refers to the wild waterfowl, commonly identified as the ruddy shelduck. Although the species itself is not the subject of the song, the inclusion of this culturally symbolic waterfowl, especially for attuned listeners with Mongolian cultural sensibilities, evokes open water, migration, distance and return, rather than being read, more simply, as a literary ornament. In this, our contemporary reinterpretation, such an association may travel further still, through extensive multi-generational Mongolian diasporic familial networks and the globalising settings in which they live.
The idea of “Mother,” with all its individual and personal resonances, may be encountered and reimagined through such a landscape — not placed outside it.
Landscape, therefore, is an important part of the story. Mother, however, is never described physically. Instead, she is known through the qualities the orator of these poetic lyrics recounts: beloved, noble, the source of blessing, and generous.
Such qualities can be understood as both personal attributes as well as social virtues. In this reading, the word ‘mother’ (eej) can also gather tender associations with home, birthplace, and nutag, allowing the maternal figure to extend beyond one’s individual life without losing immediate filial intimacy. Here, an understanding of motherhood grounded in care, dignity, and the generous work of sustaining family and community life is evoked.
It comes as no surprise then, that recent ethnographic studies of Mongolian herder households still support this idea and similarly describe motherhood not simply as kinship, but as an enduring practice of care extending across children, family, herds, and nutag. Scholarly cultural portrayals also invest mothers with wisdom, dignity, and a capacity to hold communities together (cf. Fernández-Giménez et al. 2025). Blessing and well-being, meanwhile, are considered to belong to wider networks of relationships through which kinship, memory, and fortune endure across generations (Empson 2011).
What gives these images, created with sound and words, their particular force, is the clear echo of habits of attention formed by Mongolian pastoral life. Rain, birds, changing horizons, and distant shimmers are not simply observed; they are interpreted. When living on the steppe, attentiveness to scapes is not simply aesthetic; it is a practical and practiced discipline. Weather, landscape, riverscape, cloudscape, skyscape and animal behaviour are all read as conditions constantly change.
Seen from this perspective, the song’s repeated questions acquire another resonance. What appears fleetingly in rain, dream, angir, or a distant shimmer is not treated as mere coincidence, but rather as something through which one’s memory is stirred. Outer and inner worlds converge.
The intermedia performance, “Angir Mother” may do more than offer us an eloquent expression of deeply felt personal grief and loss. Remembrance and reflection may arise through landscape. Rain, dreams, distant shimmering horizons, and the angir, may be more than just decorative images found in the lyrics of a song. For those who share such a view of the natural world, these may well be the very conditions through which Angir Mother’s presence is known despite her temporal absence.
A final word. This particular aspect of Mongolian culture, as I have come to appreciate it, is difficult to articulate. If I have made any errors of judgement due to my lack of understanding, they are of my own making and for these I humbly apologise. For this one song, you could write a whole book!
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About this Letter
A Letter from Mongolia is neither an academic paper nor a personal reflection. It begins with something observed—a song, a place, an object, a conversation, or an everyday cultural practice—and asks what it might reveal when placed in conversation with relevant scholarship. If readers come away noticing something they had not seen, heard, or understood before, then this letter has achieved its purpose.
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IN THIS SERIES (AI)
Letter from Mongolia 28: Friendship, Masculinity and Memory
Letter from Mongolia 21: Home’s Distant Outline
Letter from Mongolia 20: Woven Sonic Fabric
Letter from Mongolia 19: Udgan Tenger
Letter from Mongolia 14: Chandmani Erdene
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FURTHER READING (annotated)
Empson, Rebecca. Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory and Place in Mongolia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.An influential ethnographic study of Mongolian ideas of kinship, memory, fortune, and place. Empson shows how relationships continue through shared obligations, remembrance, and enduring connections between people and landscape.]
Fernández-Giménez, María E., Bayarbat, T., et al. “Motherhood, Mothering and Care among Mongolian Herder Women.” Agriculture and Human Values (2025). Based on life-history interviews with Mongolian herder women, this article explores motherhood as an ongoing practice of care extending across children, family, herds, and nutag (homeland). It offers a thoughtful contemporary account of how maternal care continues to shape pastoral life and community.
Pleteshner, Catherine. “Vignette 09: Narantsetseg.” CPinMongolia.com, April 2024. The Vignette series on CPinMongolia.com includes similar interview-based studies of the lives of Mongolian women. Together, they offer readers a grounded complement to the ethnographic literature on post-socialist Mongolian womanhood, showing how care, work, family, and social change are experienced within individual women’s lives. “Vignette 09: Narantsetseg” is one place to begin.
Please refer to the INDEX for other music and articles that may be of interest.
End of transcript.
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