Live at the Great Church

Yesterday I've been busy - together with Wouter Bessels - making a selection of tracks from my past Grote of St.Bavokerk (Great Church of Haarlem) performances, for an album release.

I did a total of three performances on this unique location situated in the centre of my former hometown, in 2007, 2008 and 2010, as musical support of the annual bookmarket.

Each edition consisted of two sets of around 45 minutes, of which one set contained (re-arranged) existing music, and another contained completely new (specially written for this occasion) compositions.

A short overview:

In 2007 my first Great Church concert took place. In first instance it was the intention to perform the new piece live with a brass ensemble. At the very last moment this collaboration was cancelled, and I performed the entire piece on my own, replacing the brass parts by synth parts. The upcoming album starts with the opening piece of this edition.

2008 I chose to involve two cello players (Rachel Mulder and Jasmijn Overbeek) into my newly written musical piece "The Traveller".

Due to temperature issues (it can be very cold in the Church in November, which also was the case this specific year) the cellos went out of tune more than wanted, so it was too hard (read: impossible) to do something with the multitrack recordings to make the final result sound acceptable. I could have chosen to re-record some tracks, but that would not justify the live representation on an eventual album release. As a result of this, one of the pieces without cello has been selected to appear on the album.

In 2009 my musical contribution was cancelled due to the birth of my son, exactly on the day of the performance.

As replacement my to be played sets were played from a prepared disc, which contained a rehearsal from a couple of days before the planned performance.

Although this set was never performed live, I did choose to use one of the featured tracks to appear on the cd.

From the specific piece I've excluded the percussion for a revisited version to appear at the 2010 performance.

For the flow and dynamics of the album, I've chosen to use the original 2009 version (with percussion) instead of the 2010 track.

2010 Was the concluding edition of the trilogy, where I performed last year's "EoD" ("Exhibition of Dreams") set, as well as the new project "Sinfonia Senza Percussione" (as the title suggests, entirely without any percussion), of which most will appear on the new release.

Although I had in mind to only select unreleased tracks, "Silent Conversations" is an exception to this, and will probably also be added because it fits perfectly in between the tracks.

In my opinion this album concludes the Great Church trilogy, giving a perfect overview of my performances in the Great Church so far, representing the overall atmosphere as much as possible, and exposing a variety of tracks which form clear transitions in between my so far released albums.

For those who have never attended one or more of my Great Church performances: expect lots of orchestral sounds and choirs, besides the casual electronics.

For now, I will be busy the coming weeks creating proper mixes. After that, Wouter Bessels is going to do the mastering part.
In the meanwhile I will keep everyone posted here with the progress of the new release.

This compilation of Great Church tracks (title to be announced soon) will be released as the second album on my newly established label Deserted Island Music, and should see the light in October.