Louder Than The Music

The new live album from worship band Gungor has now been released. 'A Creation Liturgy' was recorded during their 'Ghosts Upon The Earth Spring Tour' earlier this year, featuring twelve tracks from the group's highly successful recent albums 'Beautiful Things' (2010) and 'Ghosts Upon the Earth' (2011).

Lead singer Michael Gungor has also released his first book this week, titled 'The Crowd, The Critic, and The Muse: A Book for Creators'.

Discussing the group's approach to the live album, Michael explains "As I listened to the recordings of the evenings, there was a raw energy about them that I really liked. But I also heard our humanness. I heard little things that I knew we could easily 'fix' with a few overdubs.

There were moments where we could have inserted crowd samples to make the crowd sound even more excited and pumped up. But I was right in the middle of writing this book that is addressing how our most popular art continues to become more and more plastic and less human, and I just couldn't do it. I felt like I needed to let the recordings stay as live and authentic as possible. So we made a rule: no overdubs."

"While I still hear the imperfections in the performances, I am happy with this album", he continues. "I think it's a good reflection of what happened at the shows on the tour. I love that you can hear people in the crowd singing with us. Sometimes they sound great, sometimes they sound pretty rough. I like that. I love that none of the applause or crowd noise is sampled or made bigger sounding than it was. It simply is what it was."

Writing on Twitter, Michael adds, "By the way, that album cover pic is of my parents in the 70's. Saw it in a drawer and knew it had to be my next album cover".