Search - Cosmic Voices of Bulgaria :: Mechmetio

Bulgaria's unaccompanied choral folk music is organic, sophisticated, hypnotic, and mildly disturbing. It is made up of richly pungent melodic strands layered over a supporting drone until they overlap and blend, creating intervals that sound much like Western harmonies. Similar parallel overtones also occur in the Sacred Harp tradition of the Southern United States and in Tuvan throat singing. Cosmic Voices is made up of 21 women, and their voices have a strident, nasal intonation absorbed from nearby Macedonia and Turkey. The compositions can be infectiously gay, mysterious, or even both at the same time. The lively dance tunes are full of hair-raising rhythmic shifts and punctuated by exhortations and exuberant shrieks, while the spacious, dissonant slower pieces unfold and reassemble like the shifting colors of a kaleidoscope. The album was recorded under ideal acoustic conditions, so that the ensemble emerges as a miracle of resonance and clarity. --Christina Roden