Hub Hildenbrand – electric guitar (also with bow), vocals
Dirk Strakhof – doublebass
Denis Stilke – drums, percussion

The confrontation with our own mortality is unsettling. In our fast-moving achievement-oriented society, death is taboo.
But it is facing up to the reality of death which allows us to grasp the essence of life.
The sacred atmosphere of the church and the musical form of the requiem give death its place, with all the attendant grief, pain and doubt.
The starting point for this recording was the Missa Pro Defunctis (Latin: mass for the dead) as defined in the 16th century.
Our intention was to create a purely instrumental rendition of the entire process of the mass, the Latin liturgy and the Gregorian plainchants.
The subsequent processing and editing of the recorded material followed purely musical and dramaturgical considerations, detatched from the original chronology and without any claims to completeness.
We ended up with a kind of cubistic sound painting, which illuminates the rigorous form of the Catholic requiem from various different (temporal) perspectives.

The leitmotif for death is a high, bowed harmonic on the double bass, or a feedback note on the electric guitar. A continuous tone which, like the heart rate monitors used in hospitals, indicates death.

Hub Hildenbrand, Berlin, 25. July 2010
(translation: Steve Baker)