Ivo Dimchev’s 100 Kilos Yummy Christmas Carol

I can’t. I can’t deprive LAAF’s reader from the knowledge and the awareness of Ivo Dimchev’s Christmas Carol called Баница [banitsa]. It has been issued this morning and it’s about food! More precisely about a delicious dish, very popular in the Balkans and around the world.

Баница is Bulgarian for what the Turks call Börek and the Greek call τυρóπιτα*. The French call their version Fromage en croûte. While in English it’s a Cheese pie. The Western and the Eastern Roman Empires - Rome and Constantinople - though have altogether different approaches to the cheesy dish in question. While the former fill in, the later line up. Line up layer after layer of pergament thin, sometimes thick, pastry sheets like bricklayers.

As every dish popular through vast territories the savory version of baklava is prepared in millions of different ways. To each person that makes it - their own take on it. Banitsa in Bulgaria is eaten throughout the year, but most intensively - just like it’s sugary sister, the baklava - around Christmas; with a collumination on New Year’s Eve, when a баница с късмети [banitsa s kusmeti] - a cheese pie with fortune tickets stuffed inside it - is made to fortunetell the lucks during the new year of those gathered together to eat it on the New Year’s Eve.

Ivo Dimchev, as we know him, is hyper talented and diverse. His abandoned genius takes various shapes and forms. With time though his forms of expression become more and more simple altogether increasingly meaningful. The more minimalistic the lyrics the more charged with semantics his tunes are. Banitsa, in collaboration with rapper 100 kila (Hundred Kilos) - I mean really, if you're gonna sing about cheese pie you better do it with somebody gross et en gros - is no exception.

Ivo and 100's tune is mixed of the following ingredients: gourmet description of the banitsa

- solty, greesy, crispy etc.

- a la soufi sexual hints. Wait a minute, are you talking about a cheese pie or about the intimate parts of a lover and what you would do to those?

- Lockdown worries: “While I am riding my bicycle - obviously no public transport - I wonder if the bakery will open”.

Now it’s official people - With a hundred kilograms cheese pie Christmas Carol on the horizon, Christmas will certainly be coming.

*The wikipedia entry for τυρóπιτα is surreal. I recommend it.


Ivo Dimchev's The Musical Bakery

Tune in the Times of COVID19

Ivo Dimchev's 'Corona Kush Kush' goes something like "Even if you climb upon my c*ck you won't scare me Corona shouu shouuu. We will all die one day or another, so I don't want you to freak out. We will drink a kilo of rakia, we will wash with vodka and we will pour a shot of tequila in virus' arswhole'

KING - by Shaun Parker & Ivo Dimchev

King Divo

Lately the Divo Dimchev is involved in a project across the world with Australian choreographer Sean Parker. The project is a show where the Divo sings and eight male dancers dance.

The world premiere of the show called KING will appear as part of the 2019 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.

Here is an abstract of the Seymour Centre's press release where the show will be staged between the 20 and 24 of February:


"KING is a new music-dance collaboration between award-winning Director / Choreographer Shaun Parker and internationally renowned Bulgarian-born Songwriter/Vocalist Ivo Dimchev.

Set in a theatrical world that is part cocktail lounge, part jungle, KING interrogates the notion of male power, control and group dynamic amongst men. Teasing out patterns of behaviour of the cis-hetero-alpha-male against homosexual, bisexual and pansexual perspectives, Parker’s highly physical and articulate choreographic world in KING will be intertwined with the scorching live sung narration of Dimchev’s deconstructed cabaret-esque vocals.

The key protagonist and archetype in KING will be observed as a naked man, which will be created by, and instructed by Dimchev as the work progresses, and we shall witness the male body as a commodity for observation. Dimchev, as the gender-neutral narrator, creates a kingdom of men commenting on toxic masculinity. The juxtaposition of Dimchev’s androgynous counter tenor vocal narration against the male dominated world created in KING, will provide a compelling counterpoint to the notion of power and brutality found within the context of historic masculinity and socio-sexual-political structures.

KING shall deliver a biting, yet humorous theatrical expose, giving a well-deserved ‘nod’ to a society in revolt against an exhausted patriarchy."


As all Sean Parker's shows have been played in the UK, let's hope that this one too will be staged somewhere near by eventually.


For Pride 2019 maybe?


A Brexit Present

"Why do I love you Sir?"
Lyrics by Emily Dickinson
Music and performance by Ivo Dimchev

Last night, ex-X Factor contestant Ivo Dimchev presented six new songs at his gig at Zigfrid Von Underbelly, Hoxton.

The audience was dazzled by the combination of classical English poems and their contemporary fluid interpretation by the Bulgarian Divo.

"This is my Brexit present to Britain" explained Ivo "I wanted to kiss England goodby with this collection of beautiful songs based on classical English poems for which I wrote the music".

The Divo is preparing an album of ten tunes and presented to his audience at Zigfrid:

Blake's The Tiger

Emilly Dickinson's A Great Hope is Fell and Why do I love you Sir? (added here)

William Wordsworth's Daffodils (Laaf's immediate favorite)

W.B.Yeats's A Drinking Song and

T.S.Eliot's Hollow Man

Magnificent songs performed in a most hypnotic way by a real Divo.

"All these poems are so inspiring. They speak to me. I can't turn my head around why local singers don't use these lyrics", Ivo Dimchev told the audience.

To Laaf Ivo confessed that he is now composing his music for Blake's The New Jerusalem; and is also reading Shakespeare anew in search for the perfect sonnet for a present-time hit.


For Ivo Dimchev's next gig : Keep an eye on Laaf's dedicated subpage or www.ivodimchev.com