The New Yorker:

In April, 2020, about a month into Bulgaria’s first full coronavirus lockdown, when all restaurants and theatres and music venues were shut, the performance artist and musician Ivo Dimchev posted a message on his Facebook profile announcing that he would perform private shows upon request at apartments and houses around Sofia and beyond. “I don’t want to sing online,” he wrote. “I want to sing in people’s homes . . . I mean in their living rooms . . . They sit on their sofas . . . I sit in a chair three meters away with my MIDI keyboard upon my knees. Of course, we’re all wearing masks. I arrive, I don’t touch anything, I sit down, I sing for 30-40 minutes, and I leave.” The price of a home concert was buying an Ivo Dimchev T-shirt.

In the past few years, Dimchev, an openly queer artist in a relatively conservative and patriarchal country, has improbably become one of Bulgaria’s most famous singer-songwriters. As a performer, he slides effortlessly between masculine and feminine modes; his vocal range is equally protean, moving from a low baritone to a soprano embellished with theremin-like vibratos. His fans compare him to Freddie Mercury, Kate Bush, and Annie Lennox, but his closest parallel may be the English-born singer Anohni, formerly of the band Antony and the Johnsons. Dimchev’s songs, like Anohni’s, often tend toward drama and emotional intensity, rifling through the dark menagerie of the heart. Dimchev is a first-rate lyricist, profound even when plain, and at home in both English and Bulgarian; he also likes to incorporate bits of other languages. With time, his repertoire has become wildly eclectic, mixing genres high and low, drawing as much on Billie Holiday and Nina Simone as on contemporary dance and pop—not to mention opera, cabaret, lullabies, folklore, Schlager music, and chalga, a popular Balkan hybrid that mixes oriental maqams and disco beats and is often dismissed as trashy. These campy, alternately exuberant and melancholy songs have come to define Dimchev’s fame. His biggest hit, “Banitsa,” extols Bulgaria’s most popular phyllo pastry. In the video, which has been viewed nearly a million times on YouTube—Bulgaria’s total population is under seven million—Dimchev and the hip-hop artist 100 Kila, who features on the song, wear bizarre articles of clothing made out of raw dough.

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