In the margin of official religious institutions, Catholic confraternities and Muslim orders offered a mystical experience. Music played an important role in their rituals, as a way of access to God. Simple, repetitive, haunting, this music sung in groups during processions or devotional meetings was intended to place the assembly in a state of ecstatic trance.

In this recording Denis Raisin Dadre presents a dialogue between the repertory of the 16th-century Italian confraternities and that of the Persian Sufi orders. In both cultures, this music which drives believers into a state of mystical intoxication was disapproved of by the upholders of a certain orthodoxy. For the Church, the fervour produced by such bodily jubilation sometimes came uncomfortably close to a bacchanal!

‘This project, born of an intuition, turned out to be astonishingly self-evident when we realised it. Over and above the cultural differences, these songs have exactly the same aim: to encourage believers to practise a ritual that will allow them to stand outside themselves, so as to understand become aware of what lies beyond their understanding. It was this universality of the rites that so fascinated us.’ Denis Raisin Dadre