Call of bells

"The original filed recording by Robert Cole Rizzi is for the most part a rather minimalist recording. We hear a faint breeze, the small rustles of people indistinctly chatting and walking along, all organic sounds lulling us into a peaceful scene. But then we get the eruption of the church bells! Enormous and arrhythmic, they seem to gather the parishioners into the church through sheer volume. There is shuffling and scuffling, the coming together of people, the opening and closing of doors, and then near-silence again.

"I wanted to capture this sense of church-going in my composition: the call to sanctuary, the peacefulness sound within, the summoning by bells. Alongside remixing and manipulating the original recording, and inspired by the metallic rapture of the church bells, I worked exclusively with metal percussion: a small bell of my own, singing bowl cymbal, steel tongue drum and wire brushes. I found symmetry in the call of the bell, and the single note chimed from a singing bowl signalling the start of a meditation, and how church-going is a form of meditation in itself.

"At the same time of recording this, I found out that our friends in a local charitable organisation, Open Arts, were being evicted by their landlord. The property there are in had gone into receivership, and was being sold off. Part of Open Arts outreach is in running a gamelan group for adults with disabilities, who come together and create wonderful metallic soundscapes on the vast range of gamelan equipment Open Arts us. I couldn't help but see a sad reversal of the scene from Denmark: instead of people joining together peacefully under the sound of bells, they were being uprooted and disrupted."

Morning worship, Christiansfeld reimagined by DARDIS.

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This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights.

Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage