People are fantastic.
Fiddling with his shortwave radio early one morning in 1984, Pena stumbled across some strange sounds. What seemed at first like electronic oscillations turned out to be human voices capable of producing two or more notes at the same time. It took Pena seven years to ascertain that the sounds he'd heard were created in Tuva, a small Russian republic along the northwestern border of Mongolia, but within a few weeks of purchasing a Tuvan CD he was able to reproduce those sounds and had started integrating them into his music. While Ondar was greeting his fans after a concert in San Francisco during the early 1990s, Pena sidled up to the master and began vocalizing in the lower-pitched kargyraa style. Ondar was so impressed he invited Pena to Tuva's 1995 triennial throat-singing competition.