Yes, Mark,

I've actually transcribed hundreds and hundreds of rhythm sections adaptations of village folk rhythms for many, many years
and have really good transcribing ear but also it is sometimes difficult for me to hear when suspended harmonies are being
sung so it was nice to get all this feedback.

I've listened to several things recently, but it really are those 'modern' interpretive tracks off the original 'Mystere' recordings that I wanted to learn. As simple an answer as I recieved, I think I have a lot of work to try and teach myself how to accompany myself in a live looping
context.

For my whole adult life I have been drawn to what happens when modern or avant garde composers work with tradtional village enthic
musicians...........................lol, it's made me the bane of quite a few scenes, especially in the early days when so many people from California began diving into studying different traditions with a vengeance.

I was talking with a young and very articulate Zambian man last night at our local goth club. He was saying that no matter where he went in the world that he always identified himself by his region and his specific tribe within a larger ethnic group. I was saying that as
a California mutt (with Scottish, Danish, English and Cherokee blood in me) and having grown up with parents who fled a lot of the racism and anti-intellectualism that characterized where they grew up in Texas that I had NO ROOTS whatsoever. As members of a world, however, that allows us to email and video conference with people from the whole planet; one that allowed he and I to even be talking
in a bar 10,000 miles from his home.................we were friendly and able to learn from each other.

In the late 70's through the 90's we recorded so many amazing musicians from all over the world in our recording studios in Santa Cruz............people who were master musicians from other countries (West Africa, South America, India, the MiddleEast, Indonesia, Europe,
etc.) that we were able to learn a lot about the musical tradtions.................yet we didn't have enough time to get really deeply
into each tradition (unless we made concious decisions to give ourselves to them). A lot of people were critical of our efforts to self conciously fuse different traditions but one thing we learned was that the really good musicians that we studied from and recorded and toured with really dug that we were eclecticists that could not only appreciate a good Madagascaran 6/8 rhythm but that we had the chops to fuse it with modern electronics.

Jeeeez, what got that started? I don't know, but I just wanted to say that I"m not trying to master anything profoundly deep about the Bulgarian tradition. Those harmonies just really 'GET' me when I hear them and as I teach myself more and more about how to sing in different modal and scalar forms this is one I wanted to have a go at.

Thanks for being so friendly and providing so much advice.

cheers. Rick

i guess kremena is the giveaway there....yeah, i studied with Carol for a while. and got to spend time with kremena in her village last summer - that was a blast. speaking of field recordings, if you don't have martha forsyth's collection "two girls started to sing" run out and get it. there are some amazing work songs recorded literally in the field, with bugs and birds, and the sounds of threshing. and to make every singer feel better, there's one in particular where they slide down about 2 whole steps as the song progresses - you think it's some crazy scale but it's just what voices tend to do over the course of a song.