New Music From Bill Brovold, Bulgarian Voices
Bill Brovold’s Stone Soup
The Michael Goldberg Variations
(Public Eyesore)
Bach’s famous composition “The Goldberg Variations”—written for harpsichord but often performed on piano—features a melody with 30 variations that demonstrate the possibilities of the keyboard, challenge the performer’s required virtuosity and bears a cleverness and sophistication that has intrigued listeners for centuries.
With a titular nod to Bach’s work, Bill Brovold presents The Michael Goldberg Variations, named after a friend whose “heartfelt comments and wisdom”—while sometimes stinging—were influential and treasured.
The album was spurred by a suggestion from Goldberg to make a minimalist piece that wasn’t as “repetitive and meandering” as the minimalism that he was encountering, and Brovold supplied a bare acoustic guitar track—featuring a rattling three-note pattern that occasionally ends on a 4th note—to collaborators to embellish with their own methods for their own individual tracks.
Taking the moniker “Bill Brovold’s Stone Soup” for the collective, the “stone soup” folk tale is brought to mind, where contributors add food scraps to a cauldron containing just water and a stone. Like the soup, what’s interesting isn’t the stone—in this case, Brovold’s absurdly simple note pattern—but how others are inspired and what they bring to the table.
For the most part, the album has a softness and calmness, as if the players are walking on eggshells, perhaps either to not draw too much attention away from the main theme or to adhere to an unspoken yet loose and amorphous minimalist theme.
Most collaborators leave Brovold’s guitar untreated; however, Keith Moline adds a processing effect to the sample, and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm—who provides his own long tones—overlays Brovold’s guitar string buzz to cause gentle provocation.
Both members of Atlanta’s Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel contribute, with Scott Burland adding his pure, drifting and echoing theremin tones and Frank Schultz providing diving lap steel notes. Rhys Chatham’s voice and flute additions suggest some kind of spiritual ritual, while the warm drones and ringing keyboard notes from Frank Pahl evoke tenderness. Karen Haglof’s placid electric guitar wandering has a hint of psych-rock, while the faint electronics of Beth Wilusz and Erik Gustafson seem to have a delicate translucence.
As a whole, it’s perhaps like an aural glider, entering the windows of a building or flying through a forest, being lifted by diverse breezes.
The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices
BooCheeMish
(Prophecy)
“Never before...have I been so intensely subjugated by the human voice.” So wrote Ivo Watts-Russell, co-founder of the 4AD record label, about the project Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares—French for The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices.
In the mid-’80s, Peter Murphy of the band Bauhaus gave Watts-Russell a tape dub of the first Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares album, compiled by Marcel Cellier and originally released in 1975. Watts-Russell was so blown away by it that he reissued it on 4AD in 1986, leading to international recognition; the equally excellent and compelling Volume 2, released in 1987, even won a Grammy award.
Trying to articulate the “mystery” can only go so far, in technical terms. As explained by Cellier, the Bulgarian female choir music of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares has origins in the thousand-year-old Bulgarian song tradition, scarred by centuries of Ottoman domination and finally adopting Occidental harmony in the 20th century.
Melodies are woven around pedal notes that act like bagpipe drones, occasionally creating gripping dissonance, while outbursts act as flourishes to powerful, sustained chords. Beyond any words of explanation, this music hits at the gut level—it’s absolutely stunning, beautiful, disquieting and strange at the same time.
Now redubbed The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices, the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir—featured prominently on the original compilations—has a new studio album entitled BooCheeMish, available as a single CD, 2-CD set (with five bonus tracks), SACD, vinyl record, digital downloads, and a boxed set that includes all physical formats.
Like the previous releases, a number of moments are perfectly spine-tingling, with highlights including the arresting “Zableyalo Agne” and “Ganka.” Lisa Gerrard—best known for her work in Dead Can Dance and film soundtracks—is a featured singer on four tracks, and her distinctive, eclectic singing styles meld fittingly with the choir.
Some moments will likely ruffle the feathers of purists; as stated by producer and composer Petar Dundakov in the New York Times, BooCheeMish was an attempt to “broaden the sound” and “move folklore forward.”
The methods for doing this include using subtly modern, relatively tasteful instrumental arrangements with percussion, bass, strings (strummed and bowed) and other instruments; the Bulgarian human beatbox SkilleR even contributes to “Rano Ranila.”
While these arrangements are far from the cringe-worthy 1993 novelty album From Bulgaria with Love, which clumsily paired Bulgarian voices with modern hip-hop and techno beats, they are slightly distracting for those who wish to focus on the choir, making things a little less timeless, exotic and, well, mysterious.