Last year, Anthony Vine visited over seventy Catholic churches in Rome, making field recordings of the background music (BGM) that plays during visiting hours.

In Roman churches, BGM is sometimes heard playing from white cylindrical speakers mounted in marble. Recordings of chant and hymnody blanket these spaces with an easygoing sheen, inducing calm and masking extraneous noise. Wistful and tender in expression, the music seems to evoke an idealized sonorous past of reverent candlelit worship. The looped BGM also echoes a time when prayers were chanted day and night, a time when churches sounded ceaselessly. Listening closely, one may glimpse how a church understands its past and who it imagines itself to be now.

The field recordings of BGM were made by placing a phone against a speaker and recording voice memos. Because BGM is generally played at low volume, the phone picked up details not heard otherwise, excavating what's buried in this subliminally soft music. Due to the very colorful and vivid resonance of these large vaulted churches, each field recording captures a strong sonic imprint of the church itself—its spatial volume, the presence of people, construction and restoration—and imbues the very space where one is listening with these atmospheres.

"Visiting Hours" is a mix of these recordings, moving through musical genres and styles ranging from solemn liturgical chant to blissful new age instrumentals.

Anthony Vine is a composer based in Brooklyn. He creates music about spirituality, beauty, and sound itself. His work across different media, including performance, installation, and sound sculpture, is minimal in form, yet acoustically dynamic and deeply emotive.

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