Jake Muir, “Campana Sonans” (enmossed, 2025)
Colorfully described as “a synapse-popping electro-acoustic soundwalk around Western Europe’s cathedrals,” Campana Sonans is a pair of deeply immersive and hallucinatory sound collages inspired by the daily sounds of church bells in Muir’s recently adopted home city of Berlin. While his Bathhouse Blues previously delved into an immersively soft-focus and vibe-centric evocation of a specific environment, this latest album plunges much deeper into Chris Watson-esque field recording/sound collage territory.
Unlike Watson and his more purist approach, however, Muir transforms his own field recordings into a shifting and dreamlike fantasia through subtle use of effects. Then again, maybe Muir is a bit of a purist himself, as everything here sounds like it was directly sourced from field recordings without further instrumental enhancement. It certainly sounds enhanced by effects though, as the overall effect is less “Muir made some cool field recordings of church bells” and more “a lucidly dreaming Muir managed to sneak some field recording gear into a sensuously flickering, elusive, and time-bending urban dreamscape.”
The first piece, “Erzklang,” borrows its sounds from a number of different churches throughout Berlin along with “snippets of local ambiance – traffic, chattering tourists and birdsong.” Enmossed describes Muir’s vision as a “blurry snapshot of the city” in which its “its idiosyncratic color spectrum” has been “queered by various digital processes,” which feels like a pretty apt characterization, but the character of each piece is a bit different due to the nature of the bells themselves (the Berlin bells are described as more “sober” than their cheerier, more melodic English counterparts).
Unsurprisingly, Berlin’s bells are the omnipresent heart of “Erzklang,” though various street sounds languorously drift in and out of the piece throughout its duration. The character of those bell sounds evolves quite dramatically over the course of the piece, however, as Muir inventively stretches time, transforms the acoustic environment, lowers their pitch, plays with reverb length, creates feedback, and pans sounds around spatially in a shapeshifting psychoacoustic fantasia.
At one point, it even sounds like two bells are locked in a duel, but Muir’s most impressive feats are one stretch that approximates the eerie whistling of Tuvan throat singing and another that sounds like giant metal birds fluttering across a stone courtyard. The shadowy atmosphere can be quite beguiling as well, as Muir evokes a kind of lysergic noir of hissing rain, mysterious footsteps, murmured conversations, and passing trains.
The title of the second piece (“Changes”) alludes to the UK’s “distinctive ‘change ringing’ technique, where a team of bell-ringers play long varied sequences on a set of tuned bells.” In practical terms, that means that there are a few joyous and melodic crescendos that depart from the moodier tone of the Berlin piece.
In all other respects, however, it is quite similar to slow-motion sonic sorcery of “Erzklang,” though it sometimes also sounds like the rapturous clang of Christmas morning or the happy conclusion of a beautiful spring wedding. Aside from that, there are also a couple of other unique passages, such as one where it feels like the fabric of reality is slowly rippling as deep, slow-motion waves of vibrations rhythmically roll towards me or others where the melodies start to overlap to form stammering, confused, and unfamiliar new patterns.
That last bit is something of a recurring feature through Campana Sonans, as Muir seems to relish slowly transforming order into entropy and vice versa. In fact, it occurred to me at one point that this album sounds like God himself took a couple of massive bong rips and decided to amuse himself by playfully toying with the very physics of time and sound in real time. Similarly, one particular passage amusingly made me feel like the dream machine creating my altered state had started to falter and flicker, allowing some harsher, more mundane sounds from lame-ass physical reality to bleed into my cocoon of meditative bliss.
They quickly bled the fuck back out again, thankfully, but it was enough to make me aware of how beautifully Muir balances sharp and blurred sounds through the album. While I was easily lured into this album by both the concept and my appreciation of Muir’s other work, I definitely wasn’t expecting to be nearly as entranced by these collages as I ultimately was. Muir’s execution truly elevates the familiar sounds of church bells into something endlessly absorbing and even downright transcendent at times. This is some of the most sublime and immersive sound art that I have encountered in a long time.
Listen here.
