Barbara Hannigan is no stranger to pushing musical boundaries, but her latest project Electric Fields doesn’t just stretch expectations — it detonates them. Known for her fearless vocal acrobatics and devotion to contemporary music, the Canadian soprano has long been a muse for modern composers. Yet here, in an audacious turn, she channels the voice of a 12th-century mystic — Hildegard von Bingen — through a sonic lens as futuristic as it is reverent.
Created in collaboration with the famed piano duo Katia and Marielle Labèque and sonic alchemist David Chalmin, Electric Fields is less a collection of songs than a mood, a cinematic soundscape where medieval chant collides with minimalist piano, glitchy electronica, and spectral reverb. The album doesn’t just revisit Hildegard’s sacred compositions — it reinvents them. Tracks like “O virga mediatrix” open the portal with hypnotic vocals soaked in synthetic resonance, as if Hildegard herself had wandered into a Berlin nightclub mid-vigil.
But Hildegard is only the spiritual anchor in a broader constellation of female composers long left in the shadows. 17th-century visionaries like Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi surface, their works lovingly deconstructed and reassembled. On Caccini’s “Che t’ho fatt’io,” for example, the team dissolves Baroque ornamentation into pulsing club rhythms and jagged textures, making the track feel both ancient and entirely now. It’s part liturgy, part lucid dream.
Composer Bryce Dessner of The National also contributes two original works — “O orzchis Ecclesia” and “O nobilissima viriditas” — drawing on Hildegard’s invented language, a secretive linguistic code she crafted for her fellow nuns. These new compositions shimmer with delicate piano layers and a reverence for the poetic mysticism embedded in their source material. The Labèque sisters deliver cascading keys with an elegance that’s almost cinematic, while Chalmin’s production builds a soundscape both sacred and surreal.
Nowhere is the album’s duality clearer than in the two versions of Strozzi’s “Che si può fare.” One holds close to classical roots, only to slowly spiral into a turbulent blend of synths and storming piano. The other feels like it’s unraveling completely — voices layered and looped, melodies fractured and scattered into abstraction. The effect is disorienting, occasionally indulgent, but impossible to ignore.
Through it all, Hannigan’s voice remains the album’s guiding force — a pristine, agile instrument capable of transcending time, genre, and logic. Even cloaked in heavy processing, her tone gleams. There’s a crystalline clarity to her phrasing, a control that renders the most avant-garde moments emotionally grounded. The final track, a luminous take on “O vis aeternitatis,” becomes a kind of benediction, ending with a soaring 19-second high C that feels otherworldly — a moment of grace that lingers long after the music fades.
Electric Fields is not for passive listening. It’s a sensory experiment that asks you to surrender. Ten years in the making, it resists easy classification, existing somewhere between sacred ritual and sonic hallucination. It could have been a chaotic clash of ambition — instead, it is alchemy. In merging Hildegard’s divine legacy with 21st-century audacity, Hannigan and her collaborators have done something rare: they’ve made ancient music feel vital again.
