Biography
The Bulgarian Voices Angelite is among the most renowned ensembles in the categories of choral folk music. The women's choir has performed at such events as the award ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm and at the Vatican. The cryptic, mysterious, perhaps even somewhat mystical quality that characterises the choir's sound arises primarily from the singers' preference for a second voice which is maintained a slight interval to the leading melody. This results in a kind of nearly-dissonant friction as well as a great radiant power, as of an unfolded colour spectrum: The singers' voices fan out into a colourfully glowing sound palette that plays with overtone resonance. As a result, Angelite offers something that goes far beyond common folk music: It is the artful and skilful enhancement of traditional elements to form a style which - despite its a great affinity with the folklore of Bulgaria - can be considered a category of its own. On the one hand it possesses an "authentic" sound, i.e. preserves the heritage; on the other hand it has advanced into the sphere of art music.
Huun-Huur-Tu is a throat singing group from the Semi-autonomous Republic of Tuva, Russian Federation, which is situated north of Chinese Turkestan, to the west of the Mongolian border. The Tuvan throat singing technique creates multiple notes at the same time. This is done by manipulating the harmonics to amplify different overtones within their mouth, throat, and belly when they are singing, and is referred to as Khoomei in its native Tuva.
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Mikhail Alperin writes about this recording:
"The story of this project has its own tiny prelude, to my mind a rather mysterious one, which I would like to share: Some time (Roughly?) about a year ago, I developed some kind of vision of a family where the father would be from Tuva, the mother Bulgarian, the daughter a Russian, and the son Jewish. The very idea might have been nothing more than a funny whim, but then, all of a sudden, I pictured this family as a musical one, not consisting of professional musicians, but a family where ... Then I didn't get any further with my vison. Instead, I startet collecting musical material and writing scores for some non-existing future project. These, then, would be the ingredients of the salad to come: The Bulgarian Women's Choir - "the mother", overtone singers from Tuva - "the father", The Moscow Art Trio, with the Russian soul of Sergei Starostin and my own Jewish melancholy, plus a blues singer of some category or other - the children of the peoples of the world. "
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.