The première recordings of Gavin Bryars’s 32-part choral arrangement of his epochal minimalist work, Jesus’ blood never failed me yet, inspired by the singing of a homeless person on the streets of London, and an extended extrapolation in 25 parts of Robert Wylkynson’s 13-part canon from the Eton Choirbook, Jesus autem transiens, composed by Antony Pitts on a road trip into the heart of Australia. The Song Company and collaborating ensembles recorded this moving programme during lockdown in bedrooms and kitchens across Australia.

Putting together this unusual album, largely from the live and studio archives of The Song Company during a protracted period of lockdown in 2021, was a chance to reassess the nature of music and the value of human music-making—particularly with few or no instruments to hand other than the human voice and the human body. It is not a new album in the sense that the most radical pieces on it are from a previous generation, and the recordings themselves date back in one case to almost thirty years ago, but art retains its ability to confront with a clear signal amid the noise of the increasingly 'mad world' of the classic song by Tears for Fears.