In 2022, I went to the church in my home parish to record the interior of the wooden church during the Holy Saturday morning adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at the Lord’s Tomb. This publication is the result of that visit:
Recently, while going through my archives, I came across a recording I made on April 2, 2023, at the church in Murzasichle, southern Poland. It captures the faithful entering for the Sunday Lamentations, the adoration, and the Mass. I was at that church because I was working at the local cultural center as a sound engineer at the time.
There is a beautiful stillness in the wooden church as it fills with God’s people. The wood beautifully muffles footsteps, breathing and coughing. What caught my attention in this recording were two long sounds. The first, centered at a frequency of 510 Hz (somewhere between B and C), and the second, a low rumble at a frequency of about 93 Hz (F#2), come from the heating system. Then, around 17:55, a third long sound joins in, heralded by a rising glissando. It’s the organist turning on the blower that will pump air into the pipes. And it was only today, while listening back, that I realized: here we have a ready-made, ORGAN2/ASLSP. Meanwhile, the atmosphere thickens. People enter; the floor creaks under their footsteps; jackets rustle; noses suck snot back into their sinuses; hands rub together in hope of a little more warmth. Until the climax, when the altar boy pulls the string with the bells, everyone falls to their knees, and the quintessentially Polish lament begins.