AFTER SILENCE

'After Silence', the new self-released double-album from Voces8, celebrates the power of music and voicing the inexpressible. This unique four-chaptered album, inspired by the British writer Aldous Huxley, marks the ensemble's 15th anniversary and is a major turning point in release strategies for classical music. As communities around the world have united together through the power of singing, this album celebrates the capacity of the human voice to express our innermost feelings. A quote from Arvo Pa¨rt nestled in the booklet notes sums this up: 'The most sensitive musical instrument is the human soul. The next is the human voice. 'The choral works showcased in this project have been carefully compiled for their thematic power and inexhaustible capacity to express the inexpressible. In the essay from which the title After Silence is taken 'The Rest is Silence', Aldous Huxley offers his thoughts on the essential force of music. The most profoundly significant constituents of our being, he says, include our responses to beauty, pleasure, pain, ecstasy and death. These can best be 'experienced, not expressed' through silence, and after silence, through music.