Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir - Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares
It’s a lady’s vocal choir singing, for the most part, without any accompaniment. The harmonies are so different from anything you’d hear in Western music, and the way that the vocals swell and ebb. I saw them on Jools Holland with M People, and they did a song and M People came on afterwards. I remember thinking that a) I’d have hated to gone on after that, because it was so spiritually invigorating, and b) I’d have hated to have been in M People specifically because they’re so unbelievably shit. It’s music for the soul, I think; it’s music that interacts with the lizard brain. You can feel it interacting with the cells in your body, and an hour of it is like you’ve been to some sort of retreat and meditated for a week. It’s folk music, basically. There’s a song about a woman dressing for her wedding day, for example, or a mother’s lament for her lost child. Obviously I’m romanticising it, because I don’t speak Bulgarian, but it’s about the use of melody, and how melody can have a spiritual and psychological effect that even the greats in rock, pop or soul music would struggle to find. It’s like listening to angels, as far as I’m concerned. I won’t be able to do it justice by speaking about it, but it’s the record on this list I’d exhort everyone to go out and listen to immediately.