Calum Builder - Although Changed, I Arise The Same Calum Builder

Although Changed, I Arise the Same centres on Calum Builder’s (Re)Constructed Pipe Organ, a self-built instrument assembled from salvaged church organ pipes collected across Northern Denmark. With its motor, bellows, windchest and tubing fully exposed, the instrument reveals the physical mechanics of sound, transforming the pipe organ into something simultaneously ancient, fragile and radically contemporary.
Originally trained as a saxophonist, Builder did not set out to build an organ. Instead, he came to understand it as another aerophone—an instrument animated by breath. After years spent dismantling, studying and reconstructing pipe organs, he developed an instrument that behaves less like a conventional organ than an unstable acoustic synthesiser. It produces rhythmic beatings, harsh harmonic clusters, sub-bass oscillations and dense overtones, continually hovering between precision and collapse.
On Although Changed, I Arise the Same, Builder is joined by vocalists Johanna Sulkunen and Zola Mennenöh. Their voices inhabit the organ’s resonant body rather than standing apart from it, emerging from and dissolving back into its shifting harmonics. Together they perform a text assembled from fragments of psalms centred on omnipresence, broken apart and reconfigured into something both recognisable and transformed: a reconstructed organ performing a reconstructed hymn.
Recorded at Sankt Thomas Kirke in Copenhagen, the album follows Builder’s debut release for the instrument, Poor_in_Spirit (OOH-Sounds, 2025), praised by Boomkat as “vibrant new energy... comparable to Éliane Radigue.” Builder has since presented the (Re)Constructed Pipe Organ in churches, industrial spaces and concert halls across Europe, including Marmorkirken, Brønshøj Water Tower, Ballhaus Ost, Grand Hospice, Stavanger Konserthus, Organ Sound Art Festival, Labor Sonor and N Festival.
Although Changed, I Arise the Same is an exploration of reconstruction itself, where dismantled materials, fragmented texts and unstable acoustic systems become vessels for memory, transformation and enduring resonance through sound.