Customer Reviews

Volume 1

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

this is a recording on the way to and at the koprivshtitsa festival of 2000 in bulgaria. i hesitated to buy it because i'm an idiot and because i have a lot of field recordings from SE Europe, but i'm glad i did...

- there aren't any commercially available recordings of this festival, though you can find single tracks on various CDs like Yves Moreau's "Village Music" compilations.

- as a field recording, it's is a bit different because you can hear the mood of the festival here and there... horns from the street, people participating. songs flow in and out of each other due to some deft editing, so it's not one stage-recorded snippet after another.

- the songs are great quality and represent some of the region's most beautiful sounds... "flat" Balkan-style folk singing, bells and bagpipes (including, i think, an orchestra called Sto Gaidi, "100 bagpipes"), accordions, unusual strings and percussion and Turk-sounding wind instruments i can never identify, 7/8 and 9/8 time signatures.

i didn't put five stars because many might find it dissonant (tho some of us like that), because there are no liner notes or track separations, and because given my horrendous bias toward the engineer, i figured i'd lop one off the top just in case.

i feel a bit sheepish but i must admit i assumed the disc was some sort of random side project, but it's obvious that a lot of thought, experience and passion went into it. i'm glad fans of neutral milk hotel will check it out, but it's a valuable recording in its own right. maybe fans of bulgarian and balkan music will check out jeff mangum's other stuff. i'd love to be a fly on the wall for the first spin of Two Headed Boy.

I picked up this cd for a number of reasons. 1) I am a huge Neutral Milk Hotel/Jeff Mangum fan. 2) I know that while recording his opus "Aeroplane Over The Sea", Jeff listened to a lot of the kind of music heard on this disc. 3) Even if it was terrible I had to have it, because I'm a fanboy.

All that said, the music itself is interesting. It is recorded live, at what sounds like a festival. The quality is good, but the structures and sounds you will be hearing are quite different from any western music you've heard.

So for adventurous fans of Hungarian music or for Neutral Milk Hotel fans who need to understand the roots of their favorite band, this is a worthwhile purchase.

ONE WARNING: It says "Edited by Jeff Mangum" but I'm not sure what "editing" actually took place. The CD is one large and long track that fills the entire cd. Don't expect to have separated songs. It doesn't hurt the album that much, but it's awkward, and potential buyers deserve to know.

This album is simply one of the coolest things around, and when I listened to it, it inspired me to a similar project using the same 'weaving and zoning from place to place' kind of method. What this basically is, are field recordings of various different indigenous and mainstream musics from mostly Indian/Middle Eastern/Oriental festivals; they are then mixed together nicely into one flowing peice. You get Indian gamelan, mussette accordion, vocal choruses, foreign tongue talking, and psychadelic bagpipes all in one 33 minute track, and then some. It's very trippy, and it hints at some kind of endless dream where we flow from place to place without reason. Get this for your own good.

please read the liner notes folks. it's bulgaria. one festival. one country. bulgarian music. all bulgaria all the time. it sort of rhymes with malaria. bulgarian festival.