RECLINING IN MY bathtub in the second-floor rear apartment of ...

I was listening to Liturgical Music from the Russian Cathedral, one of the Nonesuch Explorer records of world music?oh so cheap, and oh so rewarding. I had never heard a Russian bass solo before and seldom have since in any other context. And the man (Michael Trubetzkoi) was only singing verses from Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Basically a spoken chant, it rises a full octave by half tones and still ends up in the sub-basement. If Paul had laid that on me, I'd have converted in a minute or been asked to buy my ticket on the Lower Track.

Today, I still get the same visceral charge from that recording?not just the bass solo, but everything in the rolling, reverberating, full-bodied harmony that comes out of a country that nobody understands. (Read Robert K. Massie's biography of Peter the Great, one of the most delightful and frightening human beings in world history. Here was a monarch six-feet-eight with a hundred contradictory aspects to his personality.)

What seems most distinctive about Russian Orthodox church music is a vocal chant-based harmony?no instrumental backing?that ranges from soprano to bass, massive yet organic. When they sing the "Credo," it shimmers with belief. Despite Byzantine (Eastern) roots, this music was composed beginning in the 18th century?a gift of Peter and Catherine the Great's westernization of Russia. The selections here are by 19th- and 20th-century composers. It will make your soul tingle.

Staying in the commie theme, if the overthrow of the Soviet Union did nothing else, it greatly simplified nomenclature. Where once it was difficult to mutter that you were listening to the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Choir, the renamed Bulgarian Women's Choir fairly trips off the tongue. Fortunately, the change of name did nothing to diminish the power and clarity of their singing.

Though they sound nothing like the South African group, they reflect the same sense of faultless precision and control as Ladysmith Black Mambazo?built on, to my mind, a stronger emotional base. Like the Russians, they sing a broad, purely vocal harmony, here punctuated by yips and trills. They are also masters (mistresses?) of dynamic range, swelling and shrinking in volume like the sea.

The opening and closing tracks on their Tour '93 CD are "Todora's Dream," a song I first heard mangled by the Pennywhistlers, an American folk group who managed to make it at once syrupy and deadly. The Choir brings it to swooping life, controlled, as always, but not inhibited. The most arresting track is "Mechmetio," in which they drift into imitating a citywide ringing of church bells. Truly beautiful.

Despite titles translated as "A Little Bird Is Singing," "Three Birds Are Singing" and "Are You a Tulip?" (well?), the voices are hard-edged, nasal, almost acidic. I know that doesn't sound inviting, but fans of bluegrass know that a rich nasal tone can simultaneously carry a piledriver message and a sweet undertone.

I won't go into background detail here, partly for lack of space but more because this is music that's best absorbed through the skin rather intellectually. You don't need to know, just feel.

What's Out There: The Bulgarians are plentiful, but you'll have to settle for an alternate Russian liturgical version.