John Foxx’s Cathedral Of Dreams

John Foxx

international news _ 24th October, 2006

John Foxx’s Cathedral Of Dreams

Text by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)

Electronic music pioneer John Foxx is to present a special performance of his recent "Cathedral Oceans 3" album at the Holy Trinity Church in Leeds.as part of the Leeds Film Festival on Friday November 3.

The former Ultravox legend and hugely respected cult figure will be improvising and adding live vocals over a new surround sound mix of the album, which was inspired by his own fascination with churches and music.

“I sang in a church choir when I was small and the way the different churches altered our performance always intrigued me,” he explained.

“I've spent the rest of my life pursuing things I heard then - echoes, reverberations, architectural spaces and the human voice - plus electronic simulations and manipulations of both. I realised that with technology you have a cathedral in a suitcase.”

Chatting to Skrufff earlier this year he recalled slipping into church before his choir friends to sing alone in the echoing chamber, though stressed his religious interests were limited from a very early age.

“I must be clear that there certainly isn't a religious aspect to my music, I’d also differentiate between religion and what is usually called spiritual,” he said.

“Religions can be power and control structures, which rely on potentially dangerous dogmas. Even ‘spiritual' is a misleading word and I prefer not to use it- it has too much new age -and old age- baggage.

I prefer to operate on the basis that music is something intrinsic to humans and to some animals,” he continued.

“If we care to take the whole concept far enough, we can see that all matter is composed of vibrations. At the most basic level, what we call music is organised noise, organised vibration, which is designed to affect anyone in its field. And we spend a great deal of time and effort organising it into what is -at best, I believe - a huge, ever shifting and evolving supra-linguistic communications matrix. One which operates through efficiently bypassing established, conscious, critical faculties and appealing direct to the core,” said John.