Comfort and Joy: Volume One
OnHiFi.com
Wes Phillips

Over the last four years, I’ve packed my portmanteau and traveled hither and yon to watch John Atkinson record Cantus, a men’s vocal ensemble. These jaunts have taken me to Minnesota in midwinter (twice!), to South Dakota and, most recently, Indiana in the waning days of spring. Obviously, I’m not in it for the exotic locales.

I go because participating in the recording process, even as a bystander, has taught me a lot about what I can and can’t hear on recordings. It has taught me even more about the way that professional musicians approach making music for recordings -- a kettle of fish very different from making music for audiences. And I go because I like Cantus.

Last June, I was present at the creation of Comfort and Joy (Volume One is out now; Volume Two will be released next Christmas). I was there in Sauder Concert Hall at Goshen College. I sat in the hall as Cantus rehearsed, and I sat in the control room backstage monitoring on my Sennheiser 650 headphones. I heard every note, every take, every composition.

The great thing about not working on a recording is that my participation ended when we packed the gear back into John Atkinson’s Land Cruiser and returned to Brooklyn. Atkinson and Cantus’s producer, Erick Lichte, had to spend the next five months laboring over the details. Even so, I had a pretty good idea what to expect when I finally received my copy of Comfort and Joy: Volume One.

I was quite wrong. It sounds fabulous -- better than anything I remember hearing when we recorded it. The voices are right . . . there . . . in . . . the . . . room! And what a room: big but not vast, reverberant but not swimmy, it’s the aural equivalent of a fresh strawberry: sweet, with just enough tang to snap everything into focus.

Not to make it sound as though the sound of the disc trumps the performances. Comfort and Joy: Volume One is a Christmas record, but not a holiday disc. The music includes a few carols ("What Child Is This," "Coventry Carol," "Silent Night"), settings of O magnum mysterium by Jacob Handl and Morten Lauridsen, and other "serious" music about the Nativity. The group’s intonation is like velvet, and the solos are uniformly excellent. Trust me -- you’ll like the music and the performances.

But it’s the sound I keep marveling at -- and you will, too. Part of the credit goes to Cantus and Lichte, who recognized just how supportive Sauder Concert Hall would be for the group’s unique blend of voices. I’ve heard those voices in many different halls, and Sauder lets Cantus sound more like Cantus than any other place I’ve heard.

The lion’s share of the credit of capturing that sound goes to engineer John Atkinson, however. I was there, I heard some of this music in Sauder Hall, and the sound on Comfort and Joy is like an idealized version of that sound. No, it isn’t the same, if only because being immersed in the sound is a different experience from hearing a stereo recording of it -- even one as well done as this one.

But the sound of Comfort and Joy is light-years better than the two-channel mixes I heard being laid down on digital tape (or hard drive) as I monitored from the control room. We audiophiles frequently delude ourselves that what we really want is no more than perfect reportage on the performance event. Well, fidelity is important -- but recording is as much art as science.

C&J is in two-channel stereo, but John Atkinson used eight microphones to capture it. By carefully blending the sound captured by those microphones -- and, in some cases, digitally adjusting the sounds’ arrival times -- he has created a recording that is truer to the sound I heard in Sauder Hall than the sound I heard directly off the microphone feed of any pair of mikes during the sessions.

If that sounds contradictory, it is -- a little. It’s also an acknowledgment that microphones and digital storage media "hear" differently than our ears do, and that true fidelity in re-creating an event lies in using those differences to create an illusion of reality.

That’s right: an illusion. It’s not as if stereo sound is "real," after all. The solidity of sound implied by the word stereophonic is an illusion -- and the best recordings make the most of such trickery. The best recordings use tricks to sound real -- and Comfort and Joy: Volume One ranks up there among the best. It takes my breath away every time I listen to it.

You should listen to it, too. Just remember to breathe.