Visions of Eternity
Or 'how I learned to stop praying and love organ music'
In this fourth edtion of Laughing Stock, @dickiewalker reflects on how a childhood growing up around religious organ music cemented his love of all things drone-y and heaven-scraping.
A couple of summers ago, my friends got married in Tuscany (as one does). My only other experience of Italy had been a brief stop in Venice on an Interrail trip when I was in my early 20s, marred by zero sleep on the overnight train (mainly through sharing a booth with a man with hideously smelly feet, out on display for the duration, who also had long hair earning him the nickname ‘Cheesy Jesus’), the intense height of summer heat (the smell!) and the hordes of tourists who made it all but impossible to enjoy anything (and of which, of course, I was adding to). Despite this less than ideal experience, I had a suspicion that I would love Italy if only I had the proper time to explore, and so I took two weeks after the wedding to visit what I saw as the big three: Florence, Naples and Rome. I did this alone, the first time I had travelled solo for longer than a day or two, and oh my what a revelation. Turns out that if you are travelling alone you don’t have to make any compromises, you can do as you please, only doing things that are at the behest of your own whims, and it’s brilliant. It transpired that what my whims wanted was to go into churches.Â
I am not a religious person; I would describe myself as a committed atheist, but I adore churches. I marvel at the beauty of the structures, the intricacies of the interiors, the luminescence of the light from the stained glass windows. I do not like what churches or organised religion stand for, but Jesus can they make a stunning house for their oppression. My favourite one by far is Liverpool Cathedral, built atop St James Mount, towering over the city. It looks less like a cathedral than a power station, and it is as magnificent inside as it is intimidating from outside, its cavernous main hall flooded with light from stunning stained windows, it’s doorway anointed by a Tracey Emin neon proclaiming ‘I Felt You And I Knew You Loved Me’, as near to scripture as I can stand. Any time I visit the city I make sure I have enough time to pay a visit, to spend some time in it’s all enveloping presence. And anywhere I go I will always visit the cathedral or prominent church, just to see how impressive they’ve managed to make their house of God.Â
In Italy I quickly learned that it was a folly not to stick your head into even the most humble looking backstreet church, because inside could be housed the most incredible, intricate religious artwork you have ever seen, or the remains of some obscure saint, just sitting there unseen by the majority of people. Catholics churches, it seems, adhere to two artistic principles: 1) gold is good, and 2) the more gruesomely realistic the depiction of Christian suffering, the better. These churches are stuffed to the high heavens with elaborate chintz, magnificent in its gaudiness, each church seemingly not realising that too much gold can be a thing. The gore too, bloody hell the gore, so much crimson pouring out of Jesus that I wasn’t sure I would ever need to see another image of the poor man’s suffering ever again. Yet it all fascinated me, and I couldn’t get enough. I’d plot days around pizza and churches, and they were both spectacular. The other thing these visits gave me in spades was impromptu blasts of glorious organ music.Â
I adore the organ. It no doubt stems from the fact my Dad played the organ in the local church when I was younger, and his Dad did too (I’d like to go into an ‘and his Dad did too’ chain here but as far as I know it’s just the two of them). On occasion I would accompany my dad to the church as he practiced, mainly alone, mainly at night. The sheer terrifying prospect of being a young child in a dark, deserted church at night with no one but my dad and the ghosts for company was enough to scare me into my best behaviour. The church was a standard C of E one, nothing like the opulence of a catholic one, just a bog standard, if anything austere church with some modest stained glass windows, simple, uncomfortable wooden pews (God did not want you to be comfortable in your time of praise to him) and a functional altar. But then there was the organ, standing behind the choir pews, it’s pipes extending into the upper reaches of the vaulted ceiling, it’s tens of stops and pedals that together created an unending, magnificent sustain of notes that reverberated off the ancient stone arches high above, where the angels carved into walls looked down on us. It was a thrill to sit with him on the organ stool as he played these odes to religion through this vast, beautiful instrument, listening to the cacophony of noise that the church structure created.Â
I grew up around this religious music, as much as I grew up around the Motown and early 60s rock and roll and easy listening that my parents both loved. I knew all the hymns in the hymn books, I could tell you who had composed different ones, that there were numerous tunes and arrangements to some of them (‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, for instance), and I could sing along with pretty much anything Ancient and Modern on Songs of Praise. I even switched primary schools halfway through my childhood because my Dad fell out with the vicar of the church attached to my first school, so I had to move across the village to the non church affiliated one. Having said this, I didn’t really consider myself to be from a religious family; there was no religious iconography in our house, my Mum is a fallen catholic who never attended church outside of special occasions, and even though I went to church every Sunday with my dad and brother when I was younger, attending Sunday School, I think it was more to give my mum some peace and quiet for a few hours rather than indoctrinate us into His fold. As soon as I was old enough to not want to go, I wasn’t forced to, but my Dad continued to play the organ week in week out, at weddings and funerals, and practiced his hymns at home on our upright piano. These years may not have given me passion for Christ, but they definitely gave me a passion for mournful, beautiful organ music.Â
Perhaps it’s something to do with my own particular father complex (for any amatuer Freuds out there), the longing for a simpler time or just deeply ingrained brain-comfort, but I have always had a strong affinity with any music featuring an organ. Pop music is studded with exceptional uses of the organ, mainly to add an air of theatre to a song, to make it soar, take it somewhere higher than maybe it started out, and naturally I was drawn to these songs growing up. Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ obviously being the pinnacle of these, but also The Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’ ‘The House of the Rising Sun by The Animals, and George Michael putting Wham to rest in the intro of the seminal ‘Faith’ to name a few. More recently, bands like Radiohead have made use of the instrument in a much more stately, downbeat way, as on the stunning closer to Kid A, ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’, one of my go to ‘I am sad and want to wallow in sad music’ tracks. Lael Neale’s ‘Every Star Shivers In The Dark’ is a shimmering, wonderful song with perhaps my favourite organ use of modern times on a vocal track, it’s open chords almost droning in the background to support Neale’s simple melody. The organ can elevate a song without even trying, it’s capacity to uplift or make you feel sad almost unrivalled, but it is also a brilliant instrument for drone and noise music, which is where the best use of the organ has been on display over the last couple of years.Â
It started for me with Kali Malone and her near two hour organ drone opus The Sacrificial Code. Having read about it on Boomkat I knew immediately that I had to listen to it. Over 10 long, contemplative pieces, Malone composes something meditative, transportive, almost spiritual in its capacity to draw you into a trance like state. I have listened many times laid on my bed in the dark, letting the music seep into my subconscious, filling my ears with long, only slightly wavering chords, and even though on some tracks very little happens, it’s magical every time. It’s the perfect lockdown music if you allow yourself to luxuriate in its power for a couple of hours, it will slow the world down, it will take away your anxiety. Then there is Anna von Hausswolff’s All Thoughts Fly, an album that makes the organ soar into places so thrilling, so exhilarating, that it’s a wonder people don’t spontaneously combust when listening to it. ‘Sacro Bosco’ features such an immense illumination of organ glory at it’s halfway mark from the depths of murky noise that I wept with joy when I first heard it. It took me back to that church with my Dad, the open stops creating a noise so all encompassing that all you can do is give yourself to it and lose yourself in it. Sarah Davachi, an artist who I’m not sure ever sleeps such is her prolific output, also released and organ heavy album last year, the wonderful Cantus, Descant which uses the organ in a more restrained way, creating some of the most beautiful passages of music of the year, ‘Midlands’ being a particular highlight. These artist’s ability to manipulate an ancient instrument usually reserved for the singing of religious praise into something so intensely moving and transportive is testament to the Western world’s fascination with making noise from the instrument that is designed to carry glory to the impossible reaches of heaven.
Composer Charles Marie-Widor said ‘organ playing is the manifestation of a will filled with the vision of eternity’, and as you listen to the open chords of ‘Midlands’ it’s hard not to agree. It can inspire passion, it can reduce to tears. In my family we have hymns that are played at funerals whereby I only need to hear the opening chords to set my brain and eyes to tear mode. ‘The Day Thou Gavest’, ‘Kinsale’, ‘Abide With Me’; they are simple and ancient but set to an organ they take on a power the likes of which I do not know in any other instrument. And now, in the hands of Malone, Davachi, von Hausswolff and others, the organ is being shifted into the avant garde edge of popular music, opening ears and minds to the power of the pipes. On my trip around Italy, every time I stepped foot in a church where there was organ music playing, I would quietly record it to send to my Dad. One of the clips was from St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, Michelangelo’s ridiculously opulent masterpiece. The response from my dad? ‘Fantastic. He nearly plays as well as me’.Â
Each week we will share some tracks that the contributers to Laughing Stock currently have on heavy rotation. You can follow the rolling playlist on Apple or Spotify.
ICYMI: More from Laughing Stock
Edtion 3 - @williampalmer on Music as Muscle Memory
Edition 2 - @connahr on Arctic Monkeys and Quantitative Easing
Edition 1 - @dickiewalker on Dua Lipa and the new pop vanguard
If you are interested in contributing to future editions of Laughing Stock, please DM either @dickiewalker or @connahr