Paul Jebanasam presents a live concert recorded in May this year at the first Subtext event held at the Church of St John the Baptist, a 14th-century church in Bristol's Old City wall.

This 25-minute work explores the various aspects of Jebanasam's unique aural vision by drowning an ancient sacred space in walls of fused textural sound and traditional instrumentation, creating a world that is at once both brutal and fragile. Employing a diverse assemblage of instruments from the baroque viol to guitar amplifiers to custom convolution and granular programs, he conjures up a haunting landscape of some unknown geology - a vast terrain where cavernous drones and deadly winds threaten the delicate ceremonial purpose of the music's mechanized rituals.

Released in July 2011

Dense layers of treated guitars and sculpted noise coalesce as if driven by some inexorable natural process only to be reduced down to the sound of a solitary semantron before a primordial raga for viola calls out the piece's elegiac coda for strings. As a brief introductory glimpse into the work of this outlying composer, Music for the Church of St John the Baptist reveals with a gradual intensity, a brooding force concerned as much with primitive liturgical structures as it is with the infinitely complex networks of digital signal processing.

Written and produced by Paul Jebanasam
Viol and Viola performed by Phil Owen
Violin performed by Geoff Wright
Video Projections by Mads Allen

Recorded at the Church of St John the Baptist, Bristol UK
Mastered by James Ginzburg at Multiverse, Bristol UK
Photography by Caroline Seymour
Artwork by Matias Cartledge
Published by Multiverse Media Publishing