12. The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal ChoirLe Mystere Des Voix Bulgeres
This Frenchman has access to Bulgaria which was pretty hard to get into in the 1970s. He heard this remarkable tradition and it’s just women who do this. They have a special tone in their voice and they had an arranger who was definitely in the Bartok school of arranging and who took Bulgarian folk songs and arranged them just for a women’s choir right down to women who could almost sing bass.
The sound they made was very nasal and I’ll tell you how you’ve already heard this: Kate Bush and myself and a lot of the musicians at the time felt as though we’d heard music from the planet Mars and it was only because Bulgaria was then so insular that this music stayed locked within their borders for decades. The recordings that this Frenchman unearthed were recorded for Bulgarian radio and they were done pretty well – the tapes were noisy but he had them re-mastered and released it in France. Later on this opened up everything and this record was number 1 in the charts. Within a year the ladies got permission to leave Bulgaria and were all over British and American television. But Kate Bush fell in love with them too and she used them on her Red Shoes album.
