It is difficult to fathom the sensation caused by the Bulgarian folk song collection "Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares" when it was first released in 1986. At that time, world music was still the realm of ethnomusicologists and geeks. Then, suddenly, black-clad hipsters were sandwiching their Sonic Youth and Nick Cave between strange, otherworldly music that resembled, if anything, Gregorian chants. The source was even more unlikely: the Bulgarian State Women's Television and Radio Choir, a group of potato-shaped, middle-aged women dressed like folk-inspired Christmas trees.
Bulgaria, still behind the Iron Curtain and largely unknown, did seem like another world. Its folk music bore little or no resemblance to the kitsch variety of Western Europe. The ethereal vocal pieces on the first album and subsequent releases mixed the flat delivery of medieval chant or the cry of the muezzin with polyphonic songs that elicited images of Byzantium or ancient Oxiana. It sounded as if the mountain villages of Bulgaria, each often having its own particular scale or chord structure, had telepathically absorbed contemporary classical music or the works of Yoko Ono.
That one of the group's first releases was on 4AD seemed like no accident. The British indie label was home to the Cocteau Twins, whose swooping, echoey compositions are perhaps the choir's closest equivalent in the Western pop idiom.