tonight was a Soul Space service at St Luke’s – Soul Space is very much along the lines of the stuff I’ve been involved with at Grace for many years, in that it dispenses with trad ideas about service format and instead uses music/video/projection and installation to explore a theme in a more creative, left-brain, open ended artsy way than the more didactic, prescriptive right-brain version of church we’re all more familiar with.
This evening’s theme was ‘Tree Of Life’ – taken from the theme for this year’s Greenbelt Festival, and we were looking at the idea of connectedness – branches being connections across the world to the global community and roots being a connection with our past, ancestors, tradition etc.
My part was to provide much ambient goo to underscore the whole thing, along with Techie Dave, who provided a few basic loops for us to build the goo from, taken from the One Giant Leap DVD. We also used the two singles from One Giant Leap – Braided Hair and whatever the other one with Maxi Jazz and Robbie Williams in is called. So the loops were in the same key as the songs so we could bring them in and out…
The audio highlight of the evening was the opening 10 minutes in which a recording of Meg reading Jesus’ Genealogy (that long list of names at the beginning of the book of Matthew) which was run into my loop set up so that while I was providing goo I could also loop chunks of Meg’s reading, and feed them into the loops, reversing them, processing them, and creating a more other-worldly effect with the initial recording. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I hope I get to do much more of it! I’ll post here when the next one is in case you fancy coming along! And there may well be some photos that appear from tonight on Vicar Dave’s Blog.