Déchoir: French for degrade, wither; to fall into decay with age; falling into a lower state than where we were.

April 15, 2019
Notre-Dame is on fire.

Eleven years ago I found myself inside this iconic cathedral thinking, absorbing…recording. I felt an overwhelming sense of awe sitting there quietly reflecting on this monolithic structure. The beauty of its architecture. The power of its presence. The weight of its history.

As I sat, the most unusual and haunting sounds filled the air. Choir voices and the great pipe organ, echoing off the massive stone walls. But nothing was constant or seemingly organized, instead it felt sporadic and random. I took out my recorder and captured these sounds.

On April 15, 2019, as the flames overtook "Our Lady of Paris" I watched on in dismay with much of the world. Saddened by the thought of potentially losing this 850-year-old monument, including all the history and relics it housed, I mourned the loss.

But then my thoughts turned to other losses. Buried losses. Lives lost to religious wars. The horrors of the Inquisition. Indigenous peoples killed and stripped of their culture, lands, and dignity in the name of God. Children abused by those in places of spiritual power. These are losses much greater than a stone building. Being raised Roman Catholic, I felt the internal conflicts churning inside me...familiar and uncomfortable feelings. The familiarity of the rituals are a part of an identity I no longer relate with.

As millions of dollars quickly rolled in from wealthy businessmen and religious devotees I pondered the disparity in the distribution of assistance to those in need. Big dollar gifts to famous landmarks make for high profile news. Helping the nameless who struggle on a daily basis to recover from institutional abuse is what Jesus would have done with those dollars...or so I was taught to believe.

The audio on this album was recorded inside Notre-Dame one cold afternoon in March of 2008. The captured sounds were then fed through an analog tape delay machine seven times. The sound morphing and evolving with each succession. Sections from each pass were then spliced together forming the full length of the piece. The full track was then fed through the tape machine three more times to add hand manipulated echo and ambiance. Finally, the entire piece was stretched to 4 times its original length slowing down time much like our perception in emergency situations. The result is a challenging listen that pulls you from the rapture of a choir of angels to the darkest depths of this gothic Goliath through the inferno, finally to emerge on the other side.

Here we are-- an opportunity, a calling to rise up our choir of voices and pull through to a new reality where beauty isn’t a luxury of the privileged, and sacred isn’t a tool against the powerless.