A saxophonist by nature, Calum Builder couldn’t help but think of the brass instrument while salvaging old church organ pipes in Northern Denmark, regarding the organ as “another aerophone working with a different kind of breath.” Honoring the prophecy of his surname, he built a reconstructed organ portable enough to take on tour. Enlisting the aid of vocalists Johanna Sulkunen and Zola Mennenöh, he combines these sounds with fragment of psalms, creating a sound that is part palimpsest, part excavation.
The opening tracks are each a quarter-hour in length, allowing the listener to dive deep into the waters of divinity. “Where Can I Go” takes its lead from Psalm 139 and pairs beautifully with Andrzej Pietrewicz & Haiyue Zhu’s #10 from last year. At first there are only forlorn taps and tones, a hint of flute, a sense of desolation: hot winds blowing across even hotter sand. The darker tones come across as howls: the keening cry of the djinn. After five minutes, the harmonies emerge like an oasis, beginning the thought (“Where can I go?”) without revealing the full passage. As the vocalists sing louder and shift intonation, their repetitions become prayers. The reconstructed organ recedes, clearing space for their words to waft to the heavens. A vocal loop rides atop an organ drone, then breaks free, growing faster and more insistent. Listeners unfamiliar with the psalm may miss the underlying comfort in the unspoken words that follow, communicated only through the breath of the pipes until the closing, consoling minute.
The opening timbre of “Surely” is like that of a train horn, recalling the steam engines of earlier times. One begins to muse on the similarities between instruments. Apart from being a punchline in the movie “Airplane!”, the word surely is found dozens of times in Scripture and most famously in the 23rd Psalm. Builder chooses the lesser known Psalm 139:11-12, NIV:
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Behind the gorgeous vocals, a drone of darkness rises like a shroud, eclipsing but not eliminating the words. Again – as in the psalm – the overlying tone is foreboding, like an accumulated mass of daily troubles, but the underlying message is that God is still present, just as the notes remain in the pipes even after they have been removed from the church organ. The thin tendrils of sound that close the piece are like the last vestiges of night retreating from the day as the piece topples. without pause into “Is As Light.” This final movement contains some of the highest vocal notes and lowest organ notes, a contrast that underlines the theme.
The album title quotes the Latin Eadem mutata resurgo, which relates not only to the logarithmic spiral, but to the nature of the soul. As famous Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli writes, “The logarithmic spiral may be used as a symbol either of fortitude and consistency in adversity, or of the human body, which after all these changes, even after death, will be restored to its exact and perfect self.” Calum Builder’s album may refer more to the first, but ultimately points the way to the second. (Richard Allen)
a closer listen 