Jesusfreakhideout.com Music News, January 2013: Rend Collective Experiment Invite Listeners To Join Them Around The Campfire

Rend Collective Experiment Invite Listeners
To Join Them Around The Campfire

New 12-Track Campfire Collection Recorded Live On Beach In Northern Ireland

Rend Collective Experiment, Campfire: Worship and Community Reimagined

NEWS SOURCE: Integrity Music
January 15, 2013

Imagine intimate worship around the glow of embers and friendship. Imagine church as a shared celebration of our stories, struggles and lives. And imagine mission as the ignition of God's people as they huddle closely around "The Consuming Fire." With Campfire, a 12-track collection recorded live on a beach in Northern Ireland, Rend Collective Experiment dare us to re-imagine worship and community.

Known for pushing artistic boundaries, the Campfire project sees Rend Collective in their creative element, using inventive and often surprising new arrangements of material from their previous two albums, Organic Family Hymnal and Homemade Worship by Handmade People, to lead a small gathering of friends in worship around a Campfire. The vocals were recorded live in the great outdoors (around the Campfire) on Ballyholme beach after the invitation to participate was given via Facebook and Twitter. This is typical of the band's desire to foster a sense of community and shared journeying as part of their worship.

As Rend's Gareth Gilkeson states: "There are no outsiders in the Kingdom. That's part of why we chose to record around the Campfire. Worship is not exclusive or confined within the walls of a church. It's a flame for everyone to gather around."

Sonically, Campfire is a fresh and innovative take on the new-folk and indie genres, an acoustic project by virtue of the fact that there are no electrical sockets on the beach. The album is entirely driven by classic, retro folk instruments that could be played by the fireside and by the ocean. The result is an album that captures the raw, rootsy, foot-stomping energy of the Irish worshippers, which has been infectious among audiences across the globe, as well as the vulnerability and intimacy of home group worship.

With imaginative instrumentation reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens, a kitschy charm like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and passionate song-crafting similar to Glen Hansard, Campfire is exciting as a piece of art. But it can be much more than that. Gilkeson and his Rend Collective bandmates pray that this album is the spark that ignites a whole new approach to corporate worship and community life. Their hope is that church will no longer be a place where some people still feel alone and only spectators, but instead, church will be a place where each person can have a chance to share and give. To bring this vision to life, they will also be encouraging others to start their own community "Campfires" and will be providing a free Campfire Resource Pack for people to download from their website, http://rendcollective.com.

Campfire will be available through all major digital service providers, including iTunes and Amazon, beginning January 29th. To view a trailer for the project, visit Campfire Project. And for more information and updates, follow the band on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rendcollective and through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/rendcollective.

For more info on Rend Collective Experiment visit the JFH Artists Database.