ceasing out now
Our new album ceasing is out now on all streaming platforms.
ceasing is a deeply personal exploration of grief, memory and the human voice.
Each track is dedicated to a grandparent of a member of SANSARA, and the record's epicentre - Joe Bates' fifteen-minute title work ceasing - was built from telephone interviews with the choir's singers about their own experiences of bereavement. Its release is timed with the season of Halloween, All Souls' Day and Día de los Muertos, when many cultures turn toward remembrance of the dead.
The album opens with an improvisation on Abide with Me, created in memory of SANSARA director Tom Herring’s grandmother. Developed with singer-composer Anna Semple through SANSARA’s Voicing Loss programme, which supports people experiencing bereavement through breathwork and collective singing, the piece begins and ends with the sound of the singers breathing, inviting listeners to join them. This spirit of remembrance runs through five centuries of music, from 16th- and 17th-century convent composers Sulpitia Cesis and Raphaella Aleotti to Rhiannon Randle’s O nata lux and Piers Connor Kennedy’s reimagining of Marin Marais’ Les Voix Humaines.
ceasing also explores the meeting point between the human voice and electronics through two works by Jonathan Harvey. His radical reworking of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater, completed with programmer-composer Gilbert Nuono in 2004, combines live choral singing with digital processing and manipulated vocal samples. Unperformable for over a decade due to obsolete technology, the work was restored by SANSARA, Joe Bates and Nuono in 2022, leading to its UK and London premieres. The album now presents its world-premiere recording. Alongside it is Harvey’s The Annunciation, one of his final compositions before his death in 2012, which returns to the unaccompanied choral writing of his youth and weaves a quotation from Palestrina’s Stabat Mater into Edwin Muir’s meditation on innocence and impending loss.
Closing the album is Joe Bates’ ceasing, commissioned by SANSARA and premiered at the Barbican in 2019. Inspired by philosopher Derek Parfit’s reflections on death, memory and the continuity of life, the work interweaves recorded telephone testimonies from SANSARA’s singers with Bates’ own experience of arriving at his grandmother’s bedside moments after her death. Moving between collective and deeply personal experiences of loss, it brings the album to an intimate and profoundly human close.