“Nine years after the first album, Forss is unveiling his second big music project – Ecclesia – with an opening audiovisual performance at Berghain.
Ecclesia is breath taking electronic music created almost entirely from sounds recorded during church services.
The project takes the shape of an app that has also been translated into an audiovisual performance. Artists Leo Lass (Depart) and Marcel Schobel (untouch.fm) stand behind the stunning visuals.
Come hear and see their songs and scenes of praise at Berghain.” – https://www.facebook.com/events/203518613092738

Rumours spread quite quickly through the city that Eric Wahlforss, one of the founders of soundcloud was soon presenting his musical project to the audience – the iPad app ECCLESIA.

One of the world biggest pioneers working in the music web2.0 industry who lives in Berlin – which place could be more suitable to perform a live demonstration on the day of the release than Berghain, one of the world’s most famous clubs?

We were all very interested to listen to the whole outcome of the guys behind the Forss project:

Official press release

Forss has announced ‘Ecclesia’; an innovative, audio-visual album that combines breath-taking electronic music with a stunning app for the iPad. 

‘Ecclesia’ is an album of music whose core inspiration is the church, created by an unlikely team of an agnostic Swedish electronic music producer, a graphic designer from Vienna and a CGI artist from Germany. Made at the dawn of a new postreligious age ‘Ecclesia’ presents a fascinating dichotomy – on one hand, church music is some of the oldest in Europe, while  the form Forss takes – electronica with fully integrated apps – couldn’t be more contemporary and cutting edge.

Having grown to love the ecclesiastical music of church organs and choirs as a child, Swedish-born electronica artist, Forss creator and founder and CTO of SoundCloud, Eric Wahlforss wanted to recreate the essence of what a church is via the medium of electronic music and set about to compose and create Ecclesia. Reflecting that a church with an organ inside it is basically the biggest instrument in the world Eric is inspired by church music as an art form, “To me there is something magical about choir music in particular. It is untouchable – a higher art form that I have never been able to practice myself. It has a very strong emotional impact on me in general. It is the music I regard the highest.”

He used two sources of raw material to compose the music. The first, which makes up the main palette of sound, consists of recordings of strings, choirs and organ played during church concerts as well as ambient noise created by the congregants. These have been cut up into tiny fragments and rearranged into a new mosaic of celestial noise; at once beautifully familiar yet still disconcertingly unusual. The second is the sample bank of noises made by wooden, stone and metal objects recorded in church that make up beats and percussion. These are the plosive, rhythmical noises that provide the link between the traditional to modern electronica.

After the first Forss album ‘Soulhack’, a down-tempo electronic album, was released in 2003 to a captive reaction, Eric has now teamed up with two digital artists, Leo Lass of the Viennese audio-visual team Depart and CGI artist Marcel Schobel of app developer untouch.fm to bring Ecclesia to life on the iPad.

The duality of the project: modern combined with ancient; religious combined with secular; digital combined with analogue; processed music combined with field recordings, is reflected in the iPad application that joins the music to complete Ecclesia. Eric explains that when he first started thinking about releasing the music it coincided with the launch of the iPad (“a very magical, intuitive, elegant thing”) and the opportunity that presented itself was too much to ignore.

When the app is launched, the user is drawn into a digital world of sculptures and scenes of intuitive album art which can be travelled through and around, with the journey having subtle effects on the music and vice versa.

Well, the Forss team – Eric Wahlforss, Leo Lass and Marcel Schobel drew a lot of people to Berghain on a Wednesday night. Not only the music scene like the owners of clubs, producers, DJs and music business related people were there, also a lot of different startup people were attending the event as in fact, this was a live demonstration how the app worked.

The guys were “playing” – demonstrating the app – in front of a special screen, one playing the music, the others taking care of the visuals on the iPad.

The music experience was great – the mind behind creating such a special app seemed genius. This great idea deserves true acknowledgement. The performance itself was okay – Eric Wahlforss had obviously fun, and the audience as well. The style of the three guys created on stage could perfectly fit into dark movies, would be lovely to see some motion picture be accompanied by music of this app!

If I should name one critical point, it would be the visuals itself. They could have been a bit “finer”, which means the visuals were not 100% satisfying.

Preview of the the Ecclesia app-album:

In an interview with wired.co.uk, Wahlforss stated: “The project takes the shape of an app that brings the listener on a journey through a series of audiovisual ‘sculptures’ assembled out of audio fragments recorded in churches, with iconic visual counterparts.”

“The project takes the shape of an app that brings the listener on a journey through a series of audiovisual ‘sculptures’ assembled out of audio fragments recorded in churches, with iconic visual counterparts.”

Which means through shifting the visual elements on the ipad, you could chose to change and lead the music, as every shape, colour and illustration had a musical counterpart. While I was watching the screen, I thought it was only that each musical element was linked to a certain sound, not being aware that it worked vice versa as well because I did not see what the guys were doing.

The most memorable track was the one with a huge reoccuring beats of a bass, and frames on the screens (red and blue ones?).

All in all it was a pleasant event where you could meet and greet people from lots of different groups – for me, who worked in startup business when soundcloud was pitching at the web 2.0 expo in Berlin and now is involved with music more and more, it was a perfect mixture of crowd.

For those of you who missed this spectacle, have a listen at Forss’ soundcloud page: http://soundcloud.com/forss/sets/ecclesia or on the  official site: http://forssmusic.com – the music is and will be free there.

For everyone owning an iPad – get the app, you will have loads of fun.

Praise innovative music experiments.

Praise pioneer thinking.

We like Forss.

Introitus & Voca Nomen Tuum can be heard here:
http://forssmusic.com
http://forssmusic.com/voca-nomen-tuum