The 2015 Indie Album Recorded Inside a Converted Church

Three winters before a small group of Montreal musicians set up microphones between wooden pews, the building had been a place of candles and Latin hymnals. The deconsecrated Église du Sacré-Cœur, tucked behind a bakery on Rue Notre-Dame, had stood empty since 2009, its stained glass still catching the late afternoon light. When the band House of Vesper received permission to record there in the winter of 2014, the project felt less like a studio booking and more like a temporary monastic retreat. Their debut full-length, Litany for the Long Light, arrived in October 2015 and quietly became one of the most talked-about independent records among listeners who cared about space as much as songwriting.

The story resonates far beyond Quebec. In Brunswick, Melbourne, fans discovered the album through late-night triple j rotation. In Glebe, Sydney, a vinyl pressing sold out within a week at a small record store off King Street. Australian listeners have always had a soft spot for records that feel handmade and devotional, and Litany for the Long Light fitted that mood perfectly. The following sections look at how the album came together, what it sounded like inside that resonant room, and why a converted church in Montreal still echoes through speakers in Adelaide, Perth, and Hobart.

A sanctuary of sound in Montreal

The Église du Sacré-Cœur was built in the 1930s for a working-class parish and closed when attendance dwindled. Its ceiling rises more than twelve metres, and the original wood floors had warped gently under decades of footfall. For a musician, those proportions are a kind of instrument in themselves. Houses of worship, even when stripped of their function, hold long natural reverb tails, soft stone surfaces, and corners that catch a voice and throw it back with unexpected warmth.

Madeleine Vesper, the band's singer and principal songwriter, heard about the building through a friend who organised chamber concerts in disused religious spaces. After a single Saturday afternoon spent walking the nave, she booked it for three weeks of recording. The band did not modify the room. They placed microphones near the altar, ran cables across the original tile, and let the building behave as it had for generations.

The decision shaped every track on the record. Drums sounded distant and processional, as though heard from the back pew. Vocals carried an intimacy that no booth could replicate. Strings arranged by cellist Inès Tremblay floated into the rafters and returned softly to the microphone.

How the recording came together

The sessions ran from January through early February 2015, in temperatures that hovered around minus twenty outside. Inside, a single electric heater kept the gear from freezing, and the band wore thick socks while they played. They worked mostly in the evenings, when street noise died down and the only sound drifting through the stained glass was distant traffic from the Bonaventure Expressway.

Recording in a cold, echoey space forced the group to make careful decisions. The team opted for close miking on most instruments and kept volume levels modest. A handful of tracks were captured live in single takes, with all six musicians playing in the same room. Others were built up slowly, layer by layer, over several nights.

Producer Julien Marchand treated the church's natural response as a fixed element rather than something to remove. He spent hours walking the space with a pair of handheld recorders, mapping how a clap in the bell tower sounded different from one near the side chapel. Those samples were folded back into the mix as ghostly punctuation between songs.

The sonic architecture of the album

Litany for the Long Light runs just over forty minutes and moves between hushed folk, slow-burning indie rock, and brief electronic interludes. The opening track, "Threshold," begins with the swell of an organ that turned out to be the church's own pipe system, coaxed back into life by a local technician. From there, the record unfolds like a series of small devotions, with short songs that feel complete on their own yet flow into each other with the patience of a long walk.

Vesper's voice sits forward in the mix without ever sounding dry. The reverberation of the nave wraps around her phrasing, so each line feels both intimate and uncontained. Lyrics lean toward imagery of thresholds, returning light, and the slow work of healing. There is very little radio polish and no obvious single, which is one reason the album travelled by word of mouth rather than through playlist placement.

The closing track, "Bells for the Unwound," uses field recordings captured inside the building at three in the morning. You can hear a radiator ticking, distant footsteps on snow, and the brief chime of a clock that no longer worked correctly. It is the kind of detail that rewards headphones and quiet rooms, qualities Australian listeners, especially those who grew up spinning records at home rather than in the car, tend to appreciate.

Reaching Australian listeners and critics

The album crossed the Pacific almost by accident. A Sydney-based music journalist covering the 2015 Pop Montreal festival mentioned the record in a dispatch for a local paper, and within weeks, copies were being requested by mail-order customers in Fitzroy and Newtown. Triple j's overnight presenters picked up on the slow-burn single "Lantern Year" and gave it steady rotation through the southern winter of that year.

Australian listeners connected with the record partly because of timing. The mid-2010s were a high-water mark for homegrown indie folk, with artists like Julia Jacklin, Fraser A. Gorman, and the work of Big Scary's Tom Iansek exploring songcraft that prized texture over hooks. House of Vesper's album offered a similar ethic but with a different accent and a different room behind it.

ARIA chart placement was modest. The record peaked just outside the top fifty, helped along by import sales at stores like Title in Adelaide and Rocksteady in Melbourne. APRA AMCOS later registered it as one of the most-played international indie folk releases on community radio during the 2015–16 survey period, a quiet honour that mattered more than chart numbers ever could.

A lasting ripple across indie scenes

Several Australian acts have since cited Litany for the Long Light as an influence on how they think about recording spaces. Melbourne folk collective Modern Hat named it as a touchstone for their 2018 EP, recorded inside a decommissioned fire station in Collingwood. Brisbane-based producer Sable Knox has mentioned the album in interviews when discussing her preference for untreated rooms and natural ambience.

The broader indie world has continued to explore the appeal of resonant, repurposed spaces. Producers and songwriters now travel to chapels, barns, and grain silos in the hope of capturing something a studio cannot manufacture. Even at the experimental edge of the form, where artists like the electro-pop producer rebuild instruments from salvaged steel and copper, the philosophy is the same. The room matters. The materials matter. The story behind the sound gives a record weight.

For House of Vesper, the church sessions became a template rather than a one-off. Their second album, recorded in 2019, used a similarly resonant space, this time an old cinema in Trois-Rivières. The early church record, though, remains the moment when their songwriting, the building, and the cold Montreal winter aligned most completely.

Revisiting the record today

Litany for the Long Light is still available on major streaming platforms used in Australia, including Spotify and Apple Music, and has been reissued on vinyl twice since 2015. Australian listeners seeking a physical copy will find it most reliably through specialist import shops in Melbourne's Acland Street precinct or via the band's own European distributor.

Anyone wanting to extend the listening session into similar territory might enjoy the the-2015-indie-compilation-that-raised-money-for-a-montreal-women-s-shelter, which gathers work by several artists in the same Montreal scene during that same year. It shares the same spirit of community-led, independent release that defined the House of Vesper sessions.

If you get the chance, listen to Litany for the Long Light late at night, with the lights low and the speakers turned just slightly louder than feels comfortable. The church in Montreal will still be there, somewhere in the room.