Ask anyone who was there and they’ll tell you that the Mongolian rock band Hanggai’s appearance at the 2013 Vancouver Folk Music Festival was one of the sonic highlights of the past decade—and a dance party of epic proportions. Hanggai’s combination of Mongolia’s distinctive horse-riding rhythms with electric-guitar power chords felt both fierce and natural, while horse-head fiddles brought an earthy folk flavour to charismatic frontman Yiliqi’s eerie overtone singing.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Hanggai is unique, but that’s not the case. This year, the Mongolian rockers of Ajinai are bringing a similarly vivid mix of instruments and cultures to the folk festival, and there’s every chance musical lightning will strike twice. Again, wild equestrian fiddling and shamanic vocals will factor into the mix, along with urban elements gleaned from the band’s decadelong sojourn in Beijing.

This doesn’t always sit well with the traditionalists back in Hohhot—but that’s not really our concern, is it?

“There are some traditional folks that don’t want anything to do with our music,” says mono-monikered singer Hugejiletu, with help from translator Jonathan Campbell. “With all of the elements we put in the music—rock and others—there are always going to be people that say ‘That’s not traditional music.’ But younger folks are eager to hear new things, especially university students in Inner Mongolia.”

As for the task of adapting the music of the Mongolian steppes to the demands of Beijing nightclubs and Canadian festivals, Hugejiletu says that change has come easily to the members of the band, who first learned music at home before seeking formal training in school. “It’s all very natural,” he says. “We make music based on our feelings. When we play, there are a few elements that are set in stone, but so much of what we do comes from how we’re feeling; we improvise a fair bit, so it’s never as though we have to go about trying to fit things together. It just all fits because of the organic process of making the music.

“The sounds we get, like with effects pedals, are of course not traditional,” he adds. “And there’s a bit of tweaking of the way I play the traditional instruments [morin khuur, the horse-head fiddle, and tobshuur, a two-stringed lute], but it wasn’t something I went about specifically trying to do; it just sort of happened.”

More conscious, perhaps, is how songs like “Grass” and “Migratory Birds” reflect the natural world—a distinctive element of Mongolian culture that must be a very valuable commodity in Beijing’s concrete jungle. The latter, for instance, is both a meditation on the touring experience and a nostalgic look back to childhood days of rabbit-hunting and “running around a vast, clean grassland”.

“We’ve always seen our music as a chance to introduce the city folks to a kind of music where nature was at the centre,” Hugejiletu says, adding that there’s another way in which Mongolian culture has shaped his band’s existence: “We’re like nomads. We move from place to place, rooted in our own traditions, but eager to be influenced by people in the places we go to. We’re keeping our minds open.”

Other open minds will want to check this band out.

Ajinai plays the Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s Stage 5 on Saturday (July 16).