After Silence
by VOCES8
After Silence: Voicing the Inexpressible
After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Aldous Huxley
In the essay from which the title After Silence is taken, Aldous Huxley offers his thoughts on the essential force of music. The most profoundly significant constituents of our being, he says, include our responses to beauty, pleasure, pain, ecstasy and death. These can best be ‘experienced, not expressed’ through silence, and after silence, through music.
The four releases that make up After Silence are here associated with the four classical elements, earth, fire, air and water:
Remembrance, invoking death, loss and the return to earth;
Devotion, focusing on the flames of love, sacred and secular;
Redemption, celebrating rebirth and the renewed breath of life;
Elemental, returning us to the ebb and flow of nature.
These successive online releases will be followed by After Silence, a double album with a beautifully produced booklet, illustrated with contemporary artworks that add a visual dimension to the exploration of the themes. Exalted, vital and freed from their original contextual restraints, the choral works showcased in this project have been carefully compiled for their thematic power and inexhaustible capacity to express the inexpressible.