Jake Muir - Campana Sonans

A Closer Listen

Not since Cities and Memory’s The Chimes has an album delved so deeply into the resonance of church bells; and Campana Sonans (Ringing Bell) has the dual advantage of being a single-artist LP and a physical release.  One may even purchase a printed stained glass tote bag to carry one’s record (plus 19 more)!

After relocating from LA to Berlin in 2019, Jake Muir became enamored with the sound of the city’s church bells.  This led him on a Europe-wide trek as he began to record and examine the vast differences between sonorities and approaches, most especially the staid practices of Germany versus the melodic sequences of England.

But of course the album is not just bells; Campana Sonans is a reflection of history and culture, an echo of centuries-old sounds presented “as is” and in reverberant fashion.  It is also a sonic portrait of the sounds that coexist inside and outside the churches: bell-ringers and passers-by, many of whom have become acclimated to the sounds.

Each piece takes up an entire side of the LP.  “Erzklang” was recorded at four Berlin locations:  “at Parochialkirche, a reformed church in Mitte; at evangelical church St. Matthäus, at Sophienkirche, another Mitte landmark; and at St. Mathias, a Roman Catholic church just in front of the Potsdam Gate.”  At first, there are no bells at all, only birds and whistling humans.  Then the peals begin. Generally used to mark time, the bells toll at regular intervals, plus a ten-minute call to mass on Sunday mornings.

By elongating these sounds, Muir turns the study into a form of musique concrète, conveying the impression of the sounds as well as the sounds themselves.  As notes become drones, they adopt an organ-like tone.  In the fifth minute, one wonders if a door is open, as a distant choir makes a brief appearance.  Hearing footsteps, one wonders what the passer-by is thinking; are they on their way to church?  Are they enjoying the bells?  Do they notice them at all, and if so, do they associate the bells with worship, with holiness, or only with the buildings themselves?

Muir’s major contribution is to alter the sounds of the bells, to present them in a new way so that one might receive them with new ears.  Many of these bells have been around for centuries, and have called generation after generation to prayer, with slowly declining returns.  One endangered practice is British change-ringing, highlighted on “Changes” ~ sequences of bells, played by hand, with shouted instructions from leaders.  The increasing rarity of change-ringing adds historical significance to Muir’s recordings, captured “at the 1000-year-old St. Oswald church in Oswestry, St. Bartholomew’s, Edgbaston and Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon, home to Shakespeare’s final resting place.”  The “mathematical cyclical patterns” are intensely musical, meant to convey the presence of the Divine.

While listening, one sinks into a sort of trance, an otherworldly, out-of-body experience.  Faith is meant not only to exist in the moment, but to collapse time, connecting to the eternal.  In Germany, the irony is that the bells are rung at specific times, while in England, bells are often rung within and without the hallowed walls.  Their cycles convey messages of the passing seasons, of life and death and new life, of the expulsion from and return to the Garden of Eden.  Mid-“Changes,” one is brought down to earth as the bells momentarily disappear and one imagines the folding of chairs between services, the shuffling of bulletins, the shaking of hands as parishioners arrive and depart. Later in the piece, a snippet of maudlin conversation is set against the sonic encroachment of the holy, begging the question, “Does what is ordinary possess a holiness of its own?”

As the LP is mostly without words, Campana Sonans widens the potential space for spirituality.  There are no sermons or scriptures here, only the sense of a greater, ineffable presence.  When dogma is excluded, the Divine feels free to enter.  (Richard Allen)