Each of us has memories, perhaps only a handful, of being either in the process of actively listening to new music or possibly hearing it within our own daily lives – and of suddenly being stopped dead in our tracks by a sound that makes goosebumps appear on your skin. Your mouth becomes dry, your mind is transported to places intimately familiar and primeval; you lose all notions of where you are in this world, or of what you were doing.
This feeling is well-documented, and usually associated with classical or jazz pieces, something longform and transformative – although I’ve personally experienced it with blues and punk too (Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was The Night springs to mind). It occurs when a piece of music does what it is designed to do, and achieves it against all odds: the emotions of the artist who is expressing themselves resonate with those of the listener. If you patronise music, painting, theatre etc, it will be because this electrifying sensation has happened to you at least once and you feel compelled to understand it, rediscover it somewhere else.
The Ensemble For Folk Songs Of The Bulgarian Radio – a choir, recording traditional Bulgarian music for radio and later TV – formed in 1952. An all-female ensemble, during the 1970s they were ‘discovered’ by a Swiss producer and released an album of traditional folk arrangements, Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares (which has been their name since 1997). It met with worldwide acclaim, and has received praise from musical heavyweights from Frank Zappa to Kate Bush, and Damon Albarn.
A live performance by the ensemble is a textbook example of this goosebump-raising phenomenon I have described. The words ‘haunting’ and ‘beautiful’ are overused everywhere, especially by people writing about music, yet the sounds of these women, especially seen live, are chilling and ancestral to the point of being downright ghostly. The harmonies created by these 16 voices is entirely unearthly, and emanated as much from a place within myself as it did from the people on stage.
Each song, separate for me from the burden of lyrical themes by a language, is steeped in deep, real emotion, and resonated on a primal level. Joy felt like joy, and sorrow like real, actual sorrow. High energy arrangements were particularly evocative of wild imagery: horses galloping through tall-grassed meadows, the skirts of colourful dresses embossed with unique patterns of flowers, matching the ones worn by the vocalists on stage, whirling in a raucous jig.
The performance of Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares’ voices, along with the quartet assembled by Georgi Andreev, was outstanding to witness up close. The set included several classics re-arranged, but also many composed by Andreev himself in a programme of ‘Voices and Strings’. An album of the compositions has been confirmed (release date currently TBC), and will surely rival the ensemble’s debut in quality and, potentially, influence.
Llais: Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Sat 12 Oct
words JASON MACHLAB photos POLLY THOMAS
