The choir of New College, Oxford University

A beautiful recording today from our home city of Oxford – here’s the choir of New College at Oxford University rehearsing inside their stunning college chapel, with its natural cavernous reverb.

And the reimagined sound is no less striking – Leonardo Rosado has transformed it into an ambient drone piece of rare beauty. He explains the direction from which he approached the sound like this:

“The title “of nothingness” represents the feeling of abandonment and hope. It is supposed to contrast the source material, full of spirituality and the existentialism that lays the foundation for atheism.

“Quoting Wikipedia “Sartre, and even more so, Jaques Lacan, use this conception of nothing as the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Equating nothingness with being leads to creation from nothing and hence God is no longer needed for there to be existence.””

City version:

Memory version: