Apple Picked the World’s Unlikeliest Voice to Sell the iPhone

The first was “Get Him Back!” by Olivia Rodrigo, a global pop star who shot the music video for her hit single with an iPhone.

The second was “Karangailyg Kara Hovaa (Dyngyldai)” by Yat-Kha, a Tuvan throat-singing fusion band led by someone who doesn’t own an iPhone.

“I have a Huawei,” says Albert Kuvezin, the group’s throat-singer and guitarist. “Because it was very cheap.”

There might not be a more unlikely partnership in tech history than the pairing of Albert Kuvezin and Apple—and not just because he’s never bought the product he’s selling.

It’s also because he lives in Siberia. To be more precise, he lives near the Mongolian border in the remote republic of Tuva, one of Russia’s poorest regions, a place the size of Florida with 1% of the state’s population. The only time he’s been to Silicon Valley was before the invention of the iPod. His favorite Apple device is a Powerbook G4 laptop that’s older than Olivia Rodrigo. And the song that Apple licensed? It was released a few decades ago on an album that sold a few thousand copies.

But what makes this obscure artist a singular talent is the way that he combines Tuvan folk with Western rock to mesmerizing effect. Kuvezin’s voice and particular genius have taken a man from Tuva around the world. He played Carnegie Hall. He wowed crowds at a Glastonbury Festival headlined by David Bowie. And now his beautiful guttural sounds are getting amplified by the megaphone of a trillion-dollar company.

If you’ve been around a television in the past month, you’ve probably seen Apple’s commercial for the iPhone 15 Pro. You’ve also probably heard it and thought: What is that?

That, as it turns out, is Yat-Kha. The ad starts with a bang and follows a slab of metal as it hurtles through space and transforms into a shiny new Apple product made with titanium. “From the edge of the universe,” the screen reads, “to the palm of your hand.” It’s a journey accompanied byguitars, a drum, gong, two-stringed Tuvan bow instrument called an igil and Kuvezin’s mystical growl.

I couldn’t get that voice out of my head, so I called the 57-year-old virtuoso to hear it for myself.

He, too, was surprised that a company that can afford to pay anybody picked a Tuvan throat-singer. “It’s a great honor,” he told me from his home in a mountain village. Kuvezin often gets requests to license Yat-Kha’s music, so he wasn’t stunned when he received an email this summer through his contact page on the indie-music platform Bandcamp. But he didn’t notice until the end of the message that it was from an Apple music supervisor, and it didn’t cross his mind that the company would want his music for the soundtrack of an iPhone ad. He thought maybe they wanted it for a ringtone.

It’s not like “Karangailyg Kara Hovaa (Dyngyldai)” was a natural choice for a consumer-electronic advertisement. The song’s name translates to “In the Endless Black Steppe.” It’s about a horse running and a woman’s hair swaying in the wind.

So when he forwarded the email to his contact at Global Music Centre, the record company that released Yat-Kha’s 1995 album “Yenisei-Punk,” she was initially skeptical that the message was really from Apple.

“Like, seriously?” said Jaana-Maria Jukkara, the director of the Finland-based label. “A very small label like ours doesn’t get these types of offers very often.”

The very small label and very large tech giant negotiated the deal over the next few weeks, and Kuvezin began hearing from his friends and relatives about the Apple commercial called “Titanium” last month. He clicked a YouTube link, watched the iPhone ad for the first time and heard Yat-Kha.

“Only in this moment,” he said, “I really understood what happened.”

He figures he caught Apple’s eye because his voice also sounds like it comes from the edge of the universe, but he can’t be sure. Kuvezin says nobody ever told him why the company selected one of his songs as the sound of an iPhone ad. “I still don’t know,” he said. (Apple declined to comment.)

What he does know is that more people are listening to his music because of it. His iPhone commercial has been viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube—which, amazingly, is about 12 million times more than Olivia Rodrigo’s.

Kuvezin has been recording music for more than 30 years. It’s resonating because of a 30-second ad for a product he doesn’t even use.

“I don’t know if people will know the name of our band,” he said. “But people will recognize the sound. Which is also good.”

That sound is nothing if not recognizable. Americans might not be familiar with throat-singing, and they don’t know Yat-Kha from yacht rock, but there’s a reason a critic once said there were only two unique voices on earth—and they belonged to Luciano Pavarotti and Albert Kuvezin. A throat-singer like Kuvezin can hit two notes simultaneously, as if one person were handling a duet by himself. It takes years of practice to master this ancient Tuvan music, whose various Western adaptations are sometimes known as overtone singing or harmonic chanting.

“It’s really incredible,” said Pekka Gronow, a Finnish ethnomusicologist who has studied throat-singing. “When you hear it for the first time, you can’t believe it.”

The first time many Americans heard it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a tradition that had been suppressed began spreading to the West. A renowned Tuvan throat-singer named Kongar-ol Ondar even made a “Late Night With David Letterman” appearance in 1999 to promote his album called “Back Tuva Future.”

But never have so many Americans had so much exposure to Tuvan throat-singing as they do right now. If you watch TV for long enough these days, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll find yourself listening to Kuvezin.

This is not something he would have predicted when he was young. In fact, Kuvezin was kicked out of his local choir as a teenage boy, when he couldn’t sing notes as they were written. That was partly because of puberty and partly because of a problem that he never outgrew. “I cannot sing in my normal voice,” he told me. Instead, he became a throat-singer. Kuvezin grew up in a musical home surrounded by relatives who sang when they gathered for holidays. “Like drunk choir,” he said. When they left behind guitars and other instruments, he would try to get a sound from them.

He would bring the same experimental spirit to his own vocal cords.

Kuvezin was a founding member of the Tuvan group Huun-Huur-Tu before he started Yat-Kha in 1991, as a way for someone who loved Jimi Hendrix to mix traditional rock ’n’ roll with traditional throat-singing. The band’s albums include a 2005 record with covers of “The Man-Machine” by Kraftwerk, “Orgasmatron” by Motörhead and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, which the New Yorker described as sounding “like Borat with a very bad cold.”

Yat-Kha had bigger fans inside a company known for thinking differently when it comes to marketing.

When I sent the iPhone commercial to Theodore Levin, a Dartmouth College music professor and the first American to study throat-singing in Tuva, he immediately understood why Apple wanted to be in business with Kuvezin.

“They’re using it to evoke the sense of something otherworldly,” Levin said. “But rather than representing the spirit world or shamanic world, it’s representing a titanium gadget.”

It didn’t take long for a deal to come together once the Apple scout tracked down Kuvezin. He put the company in touch with Jukkara, the director of Global Music Centre, which controlled the rights to the song, and she consulted with others around the industry to make sure the offer was fair. “We did not have a big fight,” she said. She declined to reveal financial details of the contract, but Kuvezin was pleased with the money.

“For unknown musician, it’s quite good,” he said. “For rock star, it’s maybe one concert.”

Kuvezin is still rocking out these days. While he’s not expecting Yat-Kha to go platinum, he is hoping to capitalize on the attention provided by his improbable Apple connection. “I think it could be great for people worldwide to discover our music,” he said. He’s also hoping the iPhone commercial serves as a billboard for Yat-Kha, though he hasn’t booked any shows or festivals yet. “But for me, more importantly, we can keep doing our music,” he said. “Maybe in the future, we’ll get more offers.”

Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]