Immense. Sometimes, the enormity of sound can be quite simply overwhelming. There’s something about the vast swell of a church organ, the huge resonance of the pipes as they fill the space, the richness enhanced further by the natural reverb. For ‘Still Light, Outside’, Chantler takes raw recordings of the organ at London’s St John-at-Hackney church as his material. That material has then been treated – heavily treated. But while it’s no longer readily recognisable as a church organ, distorted and degraded and stretched and bent as the sound is, the organic feel, the depth and the enormity of the sound remains.
Chantler fully exploits the organ’s dynamic range and the atmosphere and ambience of its location: there are moments of pin-drop silence and breathtaking, awe-inspiring hush, as well as nerve-jangling blasts of treble and incidental electronic details which provide a jarring sense of interference.
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The album’s four tracks combine to create something beyond the sum of the parts, a holistic aural experience that has depth and is stirring, uplifting and subtly powerful.
John Chantler Online
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