A moment, held in time

This piece is built from one of my favourite sounds in the world. When a bell finishes its chimes, and the environmental conditions are right (and quiet enough), you get the most wonderful, enveloping trail of ghostly reverb in which you can completely lose yourself. 

Many is the time when I’ve lost myself in this delicious experience of that bell reverb fading away, never sure when the exact instant is that I can no longer hear it, and always hoping just to hear it for a few seconds more. 

In this composition, we’ve held that wonderful final note of reverb after the bells chime, and slowly, slowly built it up with some subtle accompanying warm synth beds. The piece gets louder and the bell reverb is replaced by distant choirs and gorgeous clouds of synth ambience, which is how I imagine the sound of this reverb when I listen to it - choirs of ambience. Here, just as you’re never sure of the precise instant when you can no longer hear the reverb in real life, just so you’re never sure when it’s been entirely replaced by artificial sounds.

Reimagined based on the sounds of the midday bells at the University of Coimbra, Portugal by Cities and Memory.