Songs of the Gobi meet new sounds

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.