In the August of 2000, Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel, Circulatory System) traveled to Bulgaria. There, he attended a local music festival and documented some of the music performed on a tape deck. Who he recorded, where, and what, are all absent from the disc’s documentation. Like David Baker’s magical Pitamaha record, Mangum’s work is an unscholarly approach to an otherworldly music. There are no explanations of contextualizations given. Even the material is all blended together onto one track. The music is allowed to speak for itself — and, generally, it does. One gets a taste of, perhaps, a half-dozen different performers, all utterly mysterious sounding. This is not an album intended for students of world music or even eastern European culture. Orange Twin Field Works, Vol. 1 celebrates the beauty of the sound as an objectively beautiful thing. Listening on headphones, one is transported, not for any psychedelic sound manipulation, but because he is literally hearing the sounds of an utterly foreign world. – Jesse Jarnow