# Which Would Odval Tserendorj Drop First, the Throat or the Kick Drum?

In a rehearsal room above a tyre shop, on the first snow of November, Odval Tserendorj was asked the same question seven times and offered tea five.

By Beatrix Callender · 2026-11-01 · Music · Ulan Bator

Odval Tserendorj is pouring milk tea into a cup with a chipped rim when I ask the first time. It is 8:40 on the first of November and snow is coming down past the window in big wet flakes. 'If you had to lose one half,' I say, 'the steppe song or the techno, which goes?'

'The radiator in here is old,' she says. 'It has two settings. Off, and a fire.'

It is a fair answer to a question I did not ask. The room is on the second floor of a building off Peace Avenue, over a tyre shop, and she rents it by the month. The walls are painted cobalt on one side and orange on the other. Somebody has hung mustard curtains. A sound engineer is asleep on a pink sofa under his coat.

I ask again. She tells me about the man downstairs who changes tyres. He hums while he works, she says, always on the same low note, and she has tuned a drone to him. 'He does not know. He would stop.'

Third time, I get the snow. Fourth, a long and lovely explanation of how cold air makes the bottom of her voice rougher and the top of it brittle. Fifth, she says a kick drum is just a note, and everybody forgets that. That one is close. I write it down. Then she asks if I want more tea.

So I stop asking and listen. She plays me the demo through two speakers the size of bread bins. It runs at 156 beats a minute. The problem with it is plain by the second minute. The two halves take turns. Eight bars of song, then eight bars of kick, then song again. It is polite. Nobody interrupts anybody.

Then, around 3:10, something happens. The throat drops under the kick and stays there. For about ten seconds neither one is leading, and the whole room goes quiet around the sound. The engineer wakes up. I would like a whole record of that.

I say so. I ask which half she would cut to get there, because surely the answer is that she would cut the turn-taking. She looks at the speakers for a while.

'My grandmother kept a cow that hated thunder,' she says. 'It would stand in the doorway and refuse to go in or out. Very loud animal.'

I ask what that has to do with it. She shrugs and refills my cup.

I asked seven times. I got the cow, the radiator, the tyre man, the cold, the kick and two cups of tea. On the stairs she hands me the flask to take with me. It is salted and very good, and I have decided it counts as an answer.

Source: https://oddy.one/a/2026-11-01-which-would-odval-tserendorj-drop-first-the-throat-or-the-kick-drum/