The Mystery Of The Bulgarian Voices (featuring Lisa Gerrard) – BooCheeMish

Prophecy Productions

The melancholic charms of The Mystery Of The Bulgarian Voices‘ first 4AD LP, released as Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, still stick with me, as does that murky Cinderella moment of the cover, like some crime scene gone all arty. Thirty years old but essentially timeless, it was very much a solemn soul search of an album, just curvy overlaps of voice to the sparse flickers of instrumentation.

The mulled zest of Polegnala E Todora psychically transferred to the candlelight vigils for a dead princess, these were songs of love, harvest toil or just a reason to get down on the dance floor and whirl your Balkan thang — communal songs where the shadow of sorrow isn’t far away. Vibes that bring to mind another 4AD staple, Dead Can Dance, in that the flavours you taste are like back to the future snapshots of things that Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry would experiment with for decades to come, most notably in Gerrard’s solo career of the mid nineties and beyond. So it comes as no surprise to see Lisa featuring on this rather excellent new release from those Mystères Bulgares.

Straight from a lucrative career in soundtracking Hollywood blockbusters, Gerrard’s back doing what she does best and I’ve got to say it’s a superb return to form that gets me all excited about the new Dead Can Dance release. Her voice blends seamlessly with the ensemble’s, as if she was one of their number and although she only figures on four tracks, the choir’s dynamics certainly make it feel like more. The songs leap with a sense of happiness that wasn’t there initially back in 1987. That vocal dexterity fleshed out on percussive patterings and licks of ornamental guitar that imbue a very Moroccan desert feel, all sun spattered and silky, then flicked in a toe-pointed spangle of flamenco.

It certainly feels like BooCheeMish is tasting multiple world flavours (sometimes in the same track), but it’s more instrumentation that instructs rather than magpies, instinctively folds that microtonal power of twenty-ish voices skittering and slipping into / out of harmonic unison, vocals that evoke the vastness of the stunning countryside and that sense of ancientness it imbues. The lilting pop surprise (never thought I’d say that about Les Mystères Bulgares) of “Pora Sotunda” is amazing, seductively hooks you into a whole different perspective as it sways out on a classical curve of lilting larynx. Then it’s epic and solemn on “Mani Yanni”, Lisa’s vocal cavern-deep to timpani swells. This spiralling lightness from the collective nomadically twining it helix-like as a gypsy succubus serenades within.

If Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares was a little bit samey, this one is anything but. BooCheeMish mines a cinematic sense of space that scenically paints your closed eyes in curves of polyphonic bliss. It has occasion to get funkster, then nibbles an Aranos-like sashay that effectively dances off the page to lullaby back in reflective ransom. But it’s “Unison” that gets my album five stars. Like Dead Can Dance at their hypnotic best, this just takes you clean away. A Spiritchaser-esque incantation surfing a divine slapped-wet-washing-on-stone shuffle of rhythm for an argon-oil shanty that had me hitting re-play. “Take / Take / My lady bones”, chants Lisa as the Bulgarian collective encircles her with this addictive counterfoil to her operatic ovals. Also partial to the Sufi-snaked goodness of “Zableyalo Agne” that breaks down into pure acapella to return more otherworldly than before.

The vocals seem more free-formed this time round, liberated from the traditional (Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares was originally recorded back in 1975 when the country wasn’t very democratic), and this might have the purists up in arms; but music shouldn’t be left to gather dust, it should fairground some amusement, and as on “Tropanitsa”, poke its tongue out at convention. Honestly, BooCheeMish is a delight from start to finish, a banquet that resonates and attentively pulls you to the Bulgarian Voices’ world view that is anything but insular. A rich drama your ears can’t help but greedily lap up.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-