Eyes And Voices

If today's blip was a football match it would definitely be a game of two halves.
The top half of this shot is part of a portrait of the actor Nicholas Cage from an article I was reading in a newspaper. Those distinctively characterful and charismatic eyes were staring back at me and I just felt I had to include them in today's blip.
The article was a wide ranging interview to mark the fact that he has just made his 109th film called Dream Scenario, where he appears in the dreams of others, and covered subjects as diverse as how his film career includes consulting his subconscious, online notoriety and his public mistakes. I have to make a rather embarrassing admission here in that I've probably watched, at most, only four of his films - Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck and the Coen brothers' madcap masterpiece Raising Arizona so I really do need to catch up with at least a few more of the outings in his oeuvre - but I found the interview funny, fascinating and enthralling with some wonderful stories including how his dreams, one of which involved two-headed eagles, have influenced his choices and his brush with financial ruin about a decade ago when he blew his finances on extravagances including two castles, an island in the Bahamas and one of the US's most haunted houses, emerging with a $14 million bill for unpaid taxes.
The interviewer, Ryan Gilbey, found that despite Cage being a master of irony, sarcasm and cruelty on screen in person he was a fountain of warmth in conversation, determined to make the person he is talking to feel special.
The bottom half of today's shot, the 'voices' part, triggered a memory from a holiday in Austria with our mum when we were teenagers where we first encountered the hauntingly beautiful voices of Le Mystery Des Voix Bulgares (The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices). I'd almost completely forgotten about their wonderful music until my brother came across one of their tracks (which I have tagged below) on a podcast that he was listening to on his commute up to London.
Their official title is actually the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir and they are an internationally renowned musical ensemble that performs arrangements of traditional Bulgarian folk melodies. It was first created in 1952 but it is most recognised for its contribution to Marcel Cellier's Le Mystery Des Voix Bulgares project and they were granted the name in 1997, in recognition of the fact that it had contributed most of the songs on the original compilations.
The singers are chosen from country villages for the beauty and the openness of their voices, and undergo extensive training in the unique, centuries-old signing style influenced by Bulgaria's Thracian, Bulgarian, Ottoman and Byzantine history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePp0BtweCL0