aaamusic | On 03, Apr 2012

Opening performance at Berghain, Berlin and App launched May 2nd 2012

Full Album Release June 12th 2012

Forss has announced ‘Ecclesia’; an innovative, audio-visual album that combines breath-taking electronic music with a stunning app for the iPad.

‘Ecclesia’ is an album of music whose core inspiration is the church, created by an unlikely team of an agnostic Swedish electronic music producer, a graphic designer from Vienna and a CGI artist from Germany. Made at the dawn of a new post-religious age ‘Ecclesia’ presents a fascinating dichotomy – on one hand, church music is some of the oldest in Europe, while the form Forss takes – electronica with fully integrated apps – couldn’t be more contemporary and cutting edge.

Having grown to love the ecclesiastical music of church organs and choirs as a child, Swedish-born electronica artist, Forss creator and founder and CTO of SoundCloud, Eric Wahlforss wanted to recreate the essence of what a church is via the medium of electronic music and set about to compose and create Ecclesia .Reflecting that a church with an organ inside it is basically the biggest instrument in the world Eric is inspired by church music as an art form, “To me there is something magical about choir music in particular. It is untouchable – a higher art form that I have never been able to practice myself. It has a very strong emotional impact on me in general. It is the music I regard the highest.”

He used two sources of raw material to compose the music. The first, which makes up the main palette of sound, consists of recordings of strings, choirs and organ played during church concerts as well as ambient noise created by the congregants. These have been cut up into tiny fragments and rearranged into a new mosaic of celestial noise; at once beautifully familiar yet still disconcertingly unusual. The second is the sample bank of noises made by wooden, stone and metal objects recorded in church that make up beats and percussion. These are the plosive, rhythmical noises that provide the link between the traditional to modern electronica.

After the first Forss album ‘Soulhack’, a down-tempo electronic album, was released in 2003 to a captive reaction, Eric has now teamed up with two digital artists, Leo Lass of the Viennese audio-visual team Depart and CGI artist Marcel Schobel to bring Ecclesia to life on the iPad.

The duality of the project: modern combined with ancient; religious combined with secular; digital combined with analogue; processed music combined with field recordings, is reflected in the iPad application that joins the music to complete Ecclesia. Eric explains that when he first started thinking about releasing the music it coincided with the launch of the iPad (“a very magical, intuitive, elegant thing”) and the opportunity that presented itself was too much to ignore.

When the app is launched, the user is drawn into a digital world of sculptures and scenes of intuitive album art which can be travelled through and around, with the journey having subtle effects on the music and vice versa.

Introitus & Voca Nomen Tuum can be heard here:

forssmusic.com
forssmusic.com/voca-nomen-tuum