At the heart of Gungor’s music is that corporate transcendent experience that can happen when people get together to worship. Our music has always been designed to draw the listener into a moment of connection with the Divine. For this reason, our live shows are a very important part of our work. The live shows aren’t simply the places that we market the songs that we previously recorded; they are the places of connection from the music to real human faces, joy and pain. It is abstraction moving to connection. I think this is part of why people keep asking us for a live album.

There is something that happens live that is difficult to capture in a studio. There is a power when there is a “we” that has purposefully joined their hearts together. We have had some pretty incredible moments of connection in our live shows, but we’ve never had a way of sharing those moments with people outside of the ones at the show. We’ve actually pitched the idea of a live album several times in the past to our label, but it never worked out.

We have recently fulfilled our contract with our label and are now free to make this album that we feel like we are supposed to make, but we can’t do it without your help.

The idea is to make a live album as well as a short film of sorts. Rather than focusing on a single concert experience, we would like to record the majority of our upcoming Spring tour and compile the most “magical” moments that happen into one project.

One of our hopes in doing it this way is not only to gather from the best of our live experiences, but also to portray some of the diversity and beauty of the Body of Christ. The extent of this project is going to be directly tied to the budget. I have big dreams for what this could be, but we don’t have the resources to do it all ourselves.

To let you into my head a little bit, we are planning on doing a fair amount of international traveling this year, and I am imaging capturing expressions of the Body of Christ from all around the world. For example, how cool would it be to have one song recorded with the Church gathered in a mainstream venue in New York City, but then the next song is being sung with the Church gathered working in an African orphanage or a basement in China? How powerful would it be to bring a couple acoustic guitars and a string section into a room with a bunch of recovering drug addicts and sing “Beautiful Things” with them? That’s the kind of thing we’d like to see on this film rather than just a traditional concert DVD.

To pull it off though, we are going to need to bring a bunch of gear and personnel out on tour with us, and that’s not cheap. If we raised 30,000 dollars from Kickstarter, we could afford to get it done, but we’d still have to cut some corners. Anything extra that we could raise over our bottom line goal would go towards making this project that much better. As many problems as human religion has, we believe the Bride of Christ is beautiful and we’d like to put her on display a little bit to the world.

This is something that’s been rolling around in my head and heart for a long time, but we’ve never had a way to pull it off. I’m hoping this could be the way. Thanks for your prayers and consideration! Grace and peace,

Michael

For more info on Gungor visit the JFH Artists Database.