Tassie folds half a millennium of organ building into a widescreen quasi-ritual drone work that meditates on enchantment, communality, and material history. Dissolving distinctions between authenticity, digital and mechanical sound, and ritualised performance, the organ emerges here renewed as both ancient artefact and living medium.

RIYL Eliane Radigue, Catherine Lamb, Kali Malone, FUJI||||||||||TA, La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, or Harry Partch.

Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees uses a hybrid digital sampler instrument that superimposes reconstructed late-Medieval and Enlightenment-era organs and their differing historical tunings – all carefully sampled, retuned, and revoiced by Tassie using contemporary software and keyboard controllers; Ableton and the ROLI Seaboard Rise. Tassie sampled four organs: the Van Straten Organ, a reconstruction of a late-Medieval Dutch organ (dating from 1479) held in the collection at Het Orgelpark, Amsterdam; a 1765 Thomas Parker Enharmonic Organ and Chamber Organ dated c.1680, both at St Cecelia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh; and the Wingfield Organ at Bradford Cathedral, a reconstruction of an English Tudor organ (believed to date from the 1540s), built by the makers Goetz and Gwynn.

Structured in three parts that flow continuously (Earth, Air, Ocean), the work references Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’, and its attendant aesthetics of nature imagery and the everyday sublime.

Earth
The first part layers all four organs plus an analogue synth, setting the divergent meantone temperaments against one another in an epic megalith of radiant and fizzing harmony. The misaligned ‘wolf’ intervals and enharmonic clashes of the assorted tunings generate a swirling web of vibrant beating tones in the lower and upper registers, breathing an inner life into the vertiginous sounding body.

Air
The second section floats upward into Vicentino’s 19-note archicembalo tuning. The Parker and Van Straten organs are digitally retuned via Ableton’s microtuner. Here, timbres are filtered to a soft brass-like glow focused in the middle register, with LFOs producing subtle pitch-drifts and soft bends in dynamics, where each note gently hovers weightlessly in and out of focus.

Ocean
The final part centres on the reconstructed Wingfield organ, transformed through the ROLI keyboard’s touch sensitivity, where finger pressure and movement sculpt each note’s pulse speed and brightness. Paired once more with the Van Straten and chamber organs in their original temperaments, the music gradually builds into undulating textures until the listener finally resurfaces. The soft knocks and gently hissing wafts of the bellows emphasise that ancient yet living qualities of the instruments and their materiality. The work ends with the pulses fading to purrs and tiny waves tenderly lapping the space. 

Performed using multiple loudspeakers, the work situates both audience and performer in a shared space where sound radiates and subsumes,  rather than beam from a distant stage or organ loft. Conceptually it dismantles the hierarchies of the church organ, reimagining the instrument’s scale and weight as a communal ritual, echoing Whitman’s vision of communion through breath, and Max Weber’s notion of ‘brotherliness.’

This live performance with Zubin Kanga captures the work realised in the unique acoustic of Het Orgelpark in Amsterdam, home to one of the featured organs. As such, this recording presents multiple layers of sound, first sampled by Tassie, then performed by Kanga, and then re-captured again from new perspectives within the original acoustic, and rendered more present by a live audience.

At once grounded in material history and lifted by a timeless imagination, the work embodies Tassie’s notion of the ‘quasi-religious historically-informed artwork’: not about belief but instead collective ritual and communality, which punctures the ‘perpetual present’ of postmodern capitalism, and reconnects us to collective experience through drone’s slow-motion dissolution of ego into a shared resonance, making history audible as living, breathing instruments.

This is a singular statement: ancient air made newly resonant. A ritual of shimmering chords, communal breath, and a rare instance of contemporary organ music that is both deeply conceptual and immediately transporting. A record to sit inside, to be dissolved by.

TRACK LISTING

1. Earth 25:38

2. Air 25:08

3. Ocean 17:25

Total Time: 68:11

CREDITS

All music by Benjamin Tassie

Performed by Zubin Kanga (keyboards)

Recorded live by Bert van Dijkat Het Orgelpark, Amsterdam, 16 April 2025

Mixed by Benjamin Tassie

Mastered by Nicholas Moroz

Design by Nicholas Moroz

Cover photograph (Lake Fenton, Mount Field National Park, Tasmania) by Nicholas Moroz

Concert Photography by Tess Veldhorst / De Schaapjesfabriek

Created with the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation

Music commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London