FromBerlin via Los AngelesRecommended if you likePhilip Jeck, Félicia Atkinson, Sarah DavachiUp nextNew album Campana Sonans has just been released
Some of the loveliest ambient music – in that term’s truest sense – available to us is the sound of church bells. The cascading notes heralding a wedding are the aural equivalent of the scent of freshly cut grass, in how they evoke British summer time. But played on a large, sombre bell, the monophonic tolling that announces the time seems almost nihilist: a reminder of the ticking clock of our own lives.
All this splendid drama has been heightened by found-sound artist Jake Muir, an American living in Berlin. He has long been an inventive manipulator of sound – 2020’s The Hum of Your Veiled Voice pricked its ears up at night-time Berlin, while 2023’s Bathhouse Blues blended gay porn soundtracks into rudderless soundscapes – and his latest album, Campana Sonans (available on Bandcamp) is a deeply immersive pair of 20-minute works, built from recordings he made of church bells around Europe. He then applies effects to those recordings, chiefly a shedload of reverb.
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The first piece, Erzklang, focuses on the rather stern, even malevolent sound of church bells in Berlin, drawn out into long drones. The city’s club scene seems to throb like a memory of Saturday night on Sunday morning: there’s no pulse here, but Erzklang shudders with the reverberation of dub and the metallic beat of techno.
For the second piece, Changes, Muir travelled to the UK and recorded at three churches: St Oswald’s in Oswestry, St Bartholomew’s in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare is buried. English bells are often performed through “change ringing”: bells of different notes attached to a giant wheels, which are hauled around by rope-tugging players. This epic instrumentation allows for far more melody than the Berlin piece and, in the way Muir presents the bells, they’re almost like Steve Reich-style overlapping phases. In both pieces, the reverb makes the bells sound otherworldly, and yet Muir tempers this by including the chatter of tourists or the sound of footsteps. To listen to Muir’s work is to be lifted into a bardo, a between-space, looking back at our lives through soot-coated stained glass.
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