A plain song for complicated times

A beautiful sound for you today – plainsong chanting accompanied by organ in the cavernous surroundings of Ampleforth Abbey. Tariq Emam’s recording takes in an entire plainsong piece, with a prayer reading to close the field recording.

The reimagined version focuses on the dreamlike quality of the male voices drifting around inside that grand space, beginning with a vocal and organ loop that buries itself beneath a set of pulses and waves created from the vocal sounds.

Once buried beneath pure tones created from the voices, first of all an arpeggiated, spacey synth loop moves it to give the piece a celestial feel, before a string section adds some grandeur to the final minutes.

City version:

Memory version: