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The bells of Easter

A few days ago, I resolved to undertake on a project to record the church bells of all the various cathedrals around Munich. Every day, no matter where I am, I hear them ringing all over town, and it never fails to move me. Sometimes I’m grocery shopping, counting out my coins to give to the cashier, and I hear them come rolling through the street outside. Other times I’m in my room, balcony doors ajar, listening to music while reading articles about culture and technology, and I stop everything to listen to the bells as they wash over the courtyard behind my building.

Last night I’d set an alarm for 10am today, giving me plenty of time to rouse myself, make breakfast, and walk over to the church nearest me, St. Benno’s. The alarm went off, and as usual, I didn’t get up. Except this time I was so tired and confused, I shut the alarm off instead of just snoozing it. Damn. At 11:30am, though, I’m awoken by rolling church bells even through my shut balcony doors, and I realize I’m missing the Easter mass bells. Damn! I roll out of bed, charge my MP3 player (which has a shoddy built-in microphone I must use to make the recording), throw on some warm clothing, and I’m out the door.

On the walk over, I listen to some Technical Death Metal by my favorite band. The air is cold, and even the bakery was shut today, a sign that all things must rest.

And it came bearing gifts
Of pain, frankincense, and her
None had a home here, none but the pain

The church is only about five minutes away by foot, though tucked away on its own plaza behind some apartment buildings, nestled among interlocking streets. I arrive by about ten before noon, and I sit down on a bench outside. It’s snowing softly.

The plaza is still; I assume most everyone who will be attending the mass is already inside. I pause my music to listen to a dove, perched in the hole left by a missing stone on the church’s main facade, indignantly declaring the plaza his own. I resume the music.

The chilling chants of the carcass choir
Rosaries inverted and strung upon the razor wire

I admire the facade of the church, the massive twin towers adorned less than gracefully with a sundial and an ornate clock, hands wrought of gold. Mere minutes remained until noon, so I stopped the music and started recording. Here is the excerpt of that recording which just includes the bells, as well as various other courtyard noises, such as wind, talking passersby, and the clip-clop of high heels.

I apologize that the quality is not better. As I mentioned, the device I used to record was my ancient iRiver, and the built-in mic is hardly stellar. I spent a considerable amount of time editing out the gusts of wind by normalizing and compressing, but they’re of course still quite audible. In addition, the recording here is a 192kbps MP3 file. For the lossless version in FLAC, please click here. At 17MB, it’s only about twice as large as the MP3 file. Oh, and one noise I absolutely could not remove was the spinning up of my MP3 player’s hard drive in order to dump the buffer to disk.

What I wish I could explain here is how shocking the bells were when they began, even though I’ve heard them literally hundreds of times before. The dove even was awed, or at least recognized the futility of trying to speak over the bells. As I sat and listened, trying to shelter the microphone from wind without muffling the beautiful sound, a child was carried past by his father. The child’s face was contorted in distress, his ears covered by one hand of his own and one of his father’s. The child’s free hand was clutching a small paper cone of roasted almonds.

When the ringing ended, and the last vibrations of the bells moaned on, the birds around the courtyard started to speak again. Not the dove, but others, chirping all around me amid the falling snow. I checked that the recording was still going, then stopped it and put on more music. I walked home with headphones on.

Standing west of God
We are united in regret

A happy Easter to you.