About Us
The King/Cave project has quickly established itself on the London jazz scene and within the church, inspired by the Nordic worship concept "Thomas Mass". The first Thomas Mass was held in Helsinki, Finland, in spring 1988. Since then the Thomas Mass has stood for all that is most attractive on the "Nordic worship scene". Provision and preparation is on a lavish scale, artistry and passion, tradition and experiment are in evidence everywhere. At the heart of the concept are prayer and welcome.
Here in Britain the musical landscape is full of barriers, the church music scene as much as any scene. We'd be fooling ourselves to think we could break them down. But there's a gap in every hedge: you can always sneak through, maybe take a friend through too.
Cave & King, who met when studying literature at Cambridge, come from quite different places: Cave's first "band" was a cathedral choir, King was raised among the Bedfordshire Strict Baptists. The project is all about finding ways to marry traditions like those.
- Greenbelt review, 27th Aug 2010
- Church Times review
- Bifrost Arts
- The Welcome Wagon
- Songs for Christmas
- Mika Pohjola
- Dylan Gospel
- Helmi Levyt
- Humble House Records
- Bifrost Arts
- The Welcome Wagon
- Songs for Christmas
- Mika Pohjola
- Dylan Gospel
- Helmi Levyt
- Humble House Records
As for the theology, here are some points of departure. We're not liturgical scholars - as far as that goes, our starting point is habit and practice. Our academic background is in literary criticism and (in my case) aesthetic philosophy. I've only been studying theology for twelve months - I'm going on in the fall to do a masters in Modern Theology at Oxford. But we've been in church all our lives, James as a choirboy in a cathedral, me playing an old wonky organ in a small rural Strict Baptist chapel.
Our thinking is quite rooted in our English context. It's hard to exaggerate the extent to which the beauty and richness of the English 'cathedral' tradition - from the aesthetic and the Christian point of view - is bound up with and vitiated by the remnants of our class system. Simply put, the more profound your love for Thomas Tallis or Launcelot Andrewes or Gerard Manley Hopkins, the more painful must be the way in which their influence is manifested in England today. Certainly too few people know and love the heritage of the Christian past, but that's not the really troubling problem. Certainly the people who do know and love them tend to be all-too-recognisable in terms of socio-economic determinants. But what is really troubling is the relative (not absolute!) lack of positive tendencies - the absence of a groundswell that could move the historic treasures of the church up from the hidden depths of a historical past, into the mainstream of a present common to all who participate in the life of the church.
That would be one way of looking at what we would hope to do - the unattainable goal of our endeavours.
You could also put it in terms of a chasm that separates the worship of the traditioned church from the church of Contemporary Christian Music, 'worship music'. The chasm is not uninhabitable - there are plenty of salamanders down there, putting out some great music (I'm not at all well-informed, but I'm thinking first and foremost of the Finnish Christian music scene, then also of Sufjan Stevens, the Welcome Wagon, Ike Sturm, Bifrost Arts, I Fagiolini). It is possible to build such a bridge contemporary Christian music could be decisively freed from its isolation - and the faddism and cultural and theological shallowness that consequently beset it?
Obviously faddism and shallowness of all kinds will be a problem from us until Christ returns. But what about the divide between the church that acknowledges the Spirit's work in history and the church that doesn't? Is that a perennial problem - or could it be decisively solved? If so, on whose side does the onus fall, or does it fall equally? Is the responsbiility for reconciliation divided equally between the traditioned church and the (quasi-)traditionless church? I feel that it isn't. I feel that it is the church that has the spiritual, cultural, theological resources, the church that knows Thomas Tallis, that knows the ancient liturgies, that holds in its hands the riches of the Shaker hymn and the Bahamanian spiritual and the Afro-Finnish mass - that it is on that church that the responsibility falls to go out to church that knows none of these things and prove its case. That's what I feel when I worship in a church that hardly sings anything more than thirty years old, and never sees anything more than three hundred years old - that it's up to me to make my case in that church - which may or may not be also the case of the Lord of that church, since to me has been given a portion of what L. Cohen calls "the range and the machinery for change".
So - not a technically theological grounding of what we do. For that you'd have to wait - I'm making my way through the Church Dogmatics, and trying to work out how (and if) I can square it with John Milbank, which I just read and loved. All those kinds of questions are still very much up in the air for me - but speaking of up in the air I've just noticed it's raining, so I'll go and get the washing in, and apologise for having gone on at such length!
Ewan (from a private letter, July 2010)
Our thinking is quite rooted in our English context. It's hard to exaggerate the extent to which the beauty and richness of the English 'cathedral' tradition - from the aesthetic and the Christian point of view - is bound up with and vitiated by the remnants of our class system. Simply put, the more profound your love for Thomas Tallis or Launcelot Andrewes or Gerard Manley Hopkins, the more painful must be the way in which their influence is manifested in England today. Certainly too few people know and love the heritage of the Christian past, but that's not the really troubling problem. Certainly the people who do know and love them tend to be all-too-recognisable in terms of socio-economic determinants. But what is really troubling is the relative (not absolute!) lack of positive tendencies - the absence of a groundswell that could move the historic treasures of the church up from the hidden depths of a historical past, into the mainstream of a present common to all who participate in the life of the church.
That would be one way of looking at what we would hope to do - the unattainable goal of our endeavours.
You could also put it in terms of a chasm that separates the worship of the traditioned church from the church of Contemporary Christian Music, 'worship music'. The chasm is not uninhabitable - there are plenty of salamanders down there, putting out some great music (I'm not at all well-informed, but I'm thinking first and foremost of the Finnish Christian music scene, then also of Sufjan Stevens, the Welcome Wagon, Ike Sturm, Bifrost Arts, I Fagiolini). It is possible to build such a bridge contemporary Christian music could be decisively freed from its isolation - and the faddism and cultural and theological shallowness that consequently beset it?
Obviously faddism and shallowness of all kinds will be a problem from us until Christ returns. But what about the divide between the church that acknowledges the Spirit's work in history and the church that doesn't? Is that a perennial problem - or could it be decisively solved? If so, on whose side does the onus fall, or does it fall equally? Is the responsbiility for reconciliation divided equally between the traditioned church and the (quasi-)traditionless church? I feel that it isn't. I feel that it is the church that has the spiritual, cultural, theological resources, the church that knows Thomas Tallis, that knows the ancient liturgies, that holds in its hands the riches of the Shaker hymn and the Bahamanian spiritual and the Afro-Finnish mass - that it is on that church that the responsibility falls to go out to church that knows none of these things and prove its case. That's what I feel when I worship in a church that hardly sings anything more than thirty years old, and never sees anything more than three hundred years old - that it's up to me to make my case in that church - which may or may not be also the case of the Lord of that church, since to me has been given a portion of what L. Cohen calls "the range and the machinery for change".
So - not a technically theological grounding of what we do. For that you'd have to wait - I'm making my way through the Church Dogmatics, and trying to work out how (and if) I can square it with John Milbank, which I just read and loved. All those kinds of questions are still very much up in the air for me - but speaking of up in the air I've just noticed it's raining, so I'll go and get the washing in, and apologise for having gone on at such length!
Ewan (from a private letter, July 2010)