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This album features works by composers for whom the conception and creation of music was intimately bound up with a religious attitude towards the world. Before the birth of aesthetics in the 18th century, the symbolic or “external” meanings of music resided in the music itself; neither its expressiveness nor its purpose as an integral part of social and religious rituals were separated from a larger context of moral and spiritual considerations. In this sense, although their tonal languages and forms differ greatly, later composers such as Liszt, Franck and Messiaen followed the spirit of Bach, reflecting a musical philosophy in which musical means and theological ends were deeply intertwined, if not one and the same. "The recording of the album took place in the winter of 2020 in a church on the remote Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway. During the so-called mørketid — literally “dark-time” or dark season — the light which illuminates the skies from below the horizon for only a few hours a day holds a greater meaning. This atmosphere was, I believe, very appropriate to this particular music, and certainly had an impact on the sessions. In the North, the sense that light acquires its significance from its absence or negation is more visceral. If darkness is the great unknown, something without properties and beyond measurement, its meta-physical presence is often what inspires the more immediate qualities of experience. And as illumination stands forth in contrast with the obscure, it is also within the unknown that possibility and becoming lie." - Joachim Carr