Reimagining the sacred bells of Puja

Join us in Tamil Nadu, India today, to hear this gorgeous field recording by Gianni Siccardi, who noted while recording the Puja in a Ramana ashram that “I was fascinated by the sound of bells and by the connections with bells in western churches.”

City version:

Mark Taylor has reimagined the bell sound with a typically expansive and beautiful new composition titled “Embrace me, Arunachala”:

“As always with C&M projects, I did a lot of background reading into the social and cultural context of the original field recording before beginning to re-imagine it. I won’t explain the significance of Arunachala… those who are interested can easily research it!

“The piece itself was created entirely within the confines of KONTAKT 6 sampler using SONAR X3 as my DAW.

“The opening washes of sound are entirely taken from the original recording – 3 separate instances woven together after being pulled ‘kicking and screaming’ through some granular synthesis / sampling techniques.

“The bell loop that fades in at around the 2 minute mark is also 100% from the field recording – various short audio snippets were cut out, processed and then put back together using Kontakt.

“Also in my reimagined version you can hear:
1) A gentle acoustic and electric guitar loop
2) A mysterious female vocal line or two – all reversed and swamped with reverb / delay.
3) Improvised Rhodes Piano
4) Tabla and Tampura.
5) A rhythmic synth loop.

Memory version: