The pipe organ has a dirty secret. Before it became a symbol of Christian devotion, it was the instrument of ancient amphitheatres — sensual, ecstatic, feared. The early church resisted its introduction for centuries, wary of the competition posed by its powerful sound and its association with the licentious. With their new album radiating, Berlin duo gamut inc return to the origins of this ancient instrument.

In 2010, Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki discovered that pipe organs could be controlled via MIDI. This technique, in use since the 1980s but largely ignored by the organ world, became the foundation for a fundamental rethinking of the instrument. Over the following fifteen years, the duo developed sophisticated algorithms and control techniques as gamut inc, revolutionising the possibilities of the computer-controlled pipe organ.

The music on Radiating was created in preparation for the fifth edition of the Aggregate Festival in 2025. Over several weeks, gamut inc worked at the organ in the Chapel of Reconciliation, situated on the former death strip along the Berlin Wall. The instrument’s limited sonic spectrum demanded a compositional reduction to essentials: form, structure, gesture. The resulting sketches were then adapted for the organ at Auenkirche — the second-largest pipe organ in Berlin — and enriched with the colourful registers of that larger instrument.

With a computer-controlled pipe organ, millisecond-precise algorithmic MIDI control allows interventions that would be impossible on a conventionally played instrument. In the opening track Circulating, glissandi traverse the sonic space — a continuous gliding that dissolves the boundary between pitch and movement. In Pulsing, a sorting algorithm generates surprisingly emotional chord progressions. What begins as an abstract computational operation unfolds into sprawling structures of near-symphonic force. Percussive textures emerge outside mechanical tempo grids; fusion effects alter the organ’s sound from within — a sound that multiplies and expands through the resonant body of the church space.

In their pioneering work with the MIDI-controlled pipe organ, the duo’s interest has never been hypervirtuosity alone — for gamut inc, the computer-controlled organ is not primarily a vehicle for demonstrating what lies beyond humanly playable music. Their interest lies elsewhere: in expanding the instrument’s own sonic language. Radiating means precisely that: technology becomes the medium for a return to the origins of this powerful instrument. And to a music that is sensual, physical, and ecstatic.