For every musician connected with church music, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is a highlight of the liturgical year, and it was at a performance of this very work that we first met. Playing together in the continuo unit requires a seventh sense for one’s fellow musicians and a heightened awareness of the musical breath of the soloists. In short, it requires non-verbal communication. The feeling of being able to rely on each other, and the perfect rapport in our musical understanding, kindled our desire to record a completely novel kind of music album.

2022 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). He wrote his Mass in G minor (Curwen edition) after the First World War, at the same time as his Pastoral Symphony. Some believe that it is a way for Vaughan Williams to heal the world to write this beautiful music. Vokalensemblen Sundbyberg presents this new release pairing an internationally renowned composer's large a cappella work with the finest contemporary Swedish a cappella music. Vokalensemblen Sundbyberg (the Sundbyberg Vocal Ensemble) consists of music graduates, choral conductors and experienced choral singers. Central to it's music-making are the importance of breathing, good intonation and passion. The choir aims to promote the development of newly written Swedish choral music for the church by means of commissions and collaborations with composers, and also to increase people's familiarity with lesser-known works, not least those by Swedish composers.

Bruno Blum, himself part of the Punk movement in London in the late Seventies, here returns to the original forms of subversion contained in Rock. As hedonists looking for ways to overtake their own selves as well as their social status, Artists — and particularly Musicians — seemed to be the only ones who could free themselves of society’s rigorous norms.
From Charlie Parker to Bo Diddley via Artie Shaw or Richard Berry, the irreverence and arrogance later celebrated in the Punk Rock of Iggy Pop, The Clash or The Ramones has roots in the frenzied tempos of Bop and the contorted melodies of Free Jazz, with branches as far as the sexual allusions of the Blues and the wild solos of Rockabilly.