We were very serious about the whole thing," Raud says.
"We were really trying to avoid letting it become a joke. Whether turning "Post aeternitatem" ("After Forever") into a Gregorian chant, setting "Oculi filioli" ("Junior's Eyes") to twinkling harp and the buzzing drone of a hurdy gurdy, or combining bagpipe and jaunty frame drum into a jig-like arrangment on "Via gravis" ("Hard Road"), the renditions suggest an impeccably-performed church recital rather than Al Yankovich-style parody. It's a testament to Rondellus' abilities that for all the obvious novelty of the concept and origins of "Sabbatum," the record sounds utterly convincing. Rondellus then added additional vocal parts, harp, lute, hurdy gurdy, bagpipe, fiddle and other instruments to the songs, all the while following 14th - or rather, IXV - Century style.
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We wrote the melody line out without fixing the rhythm and note values and interpreted them in a free Gregorian chantlike manner." "Note values and rhythm in medieval notation are not fixed, so there is much space for different interpretation when performing these melodies. "Arranging them was just like our everyday work with the early sources," Staak explains via email. Working with English-to-Latin translations prepared by a local university professor - who had to invent words, among them "supersonica," for terms that didn't exist in the Middle Ages - they set about turning the likes of "Behind the Wall of Sleep" and "Spiral Architect" into "Post murum somnii" and "Architectus urbis caelestis." Eventually, Rondellus came to see the project as an interesting challenge.
"I explained to them that this is a misunderstanding, the songs were warnings against satanism," says Raud, who showed the members interviews with Geezer Butler in which the Sabbath lyricist explained his intentions. It hardly seemed fit company for their other recordings, which include songs on the themes of the rosary and sacred music connected to medieval saints and icons such as what Hildegard von Bingen.
What's more, Black Sabbath's princes-of-darkness image posed a problem for the members of Rondellus, most of whom are members of various Christian faiths. He then approached Rondellus about taking part in the project for his label, which he'd founded to promote Estonian music after leading a popular rock in the 90s. Mediaeval Baebes, a nonet of young women who write original songs based on poems and musical styles of the Middle Ages, recently released their fourth CD, "The Rose." Alternative country band the Anomoanon recently released "Envoi Villon," an EP of songs using the work of 15th Century French poet Francois Villon(translated to English) as lyrics. "The melodies of many Sabbath songs are similar to medieval melodies," observes Robert Staak, co-founder, with his wife, Maria, of Rondellus, the medieval music ensemble that arranged and performed the music on "Sabbatum." "The idea we were playing with was that all the `Sabbatum' versions were the original, that there were these medieval manuscripts that these four guys from Birmingham would find centuries later and record the way they did," says Mihkel Raud, who conceived of the project, recruited Rondellus and released the CD on his own Beg the Bug Records label.Īs unlikely as the concept may seem, "Sabbatum" is part of a recent spate of records that fuse modern songs with medieval elements.
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