It would be hard to deny that the appeal of Blake Carrington’s Cathedral Scan is as much to do with its conceptual elegance than pure aural pleasure. It springs from an ambitious sound design conceit whereby architectural plans of Gothic cathedrals generate images scanned via a Max/MSP/Jitter software patch that extrapolates the scan, mapping vision-to-sound, and thence to tempo and timbre; it renders a particular musical simulation of each structure, each scan/plan akin to a score. Live, the material is rendered into an audio-visual performance, the album capturing edits from several such event in large churches. The artist mixes the direct software-generated signal with the cavernous resonance of the performance space (clip below). Performances of the work are, by all accounts, attended by a certain air of non-religious religiosity (see, e.g. the following link); all that quasi-ceremonial jazz – the aspect of the performer as priest, combined with the scans of cathedrals, the nature of the venue, and the music’s trance-cum-hymnal. It’s no ecstatic church replicant, but there’s a recursive quality at work that – like prayer intoning or church organ overtures – induces an altered state of rapt contemplation. Carrington’s purpose in fiddling with these history-freighted icons would seem to be something to do with exploring the articulation of the reverential, the transcendent, in times of fractured metanarratives – when the sacred is no longer universally but individually (or communally?) constructed. On a more mundane note, the tones do in fact at times seem modeled, somewhat obviously, on a church organ mimetic, while at others we find the kind of arpeggiating concatenations familiar from minimalism a la Glass, or Riley; in fact, it must be said that these are not always the kind of tones or textures one would choose (note: speaking here as a sometime musician); however, this being a meta-musical affair, there’s a certain suspension of musico-critical disbelief in light of Cathedral Scan‘s greater synaesthetic achievement.
– Alan Lockett