Ibukun Sunday builds the album Olusin [Worshippers] from sacred room sound

Ibukun Sunday has released Olusin [Worshippers], an album built around the way sound behaves inside places of worship, and The Quietus has made it their album of the week.

The UK-based Nigerian producer takes the reverbs, hushes and stray noises of sacred rooms and stretches them into new shapes. What the record chases is not a particular building but the state of listening those rooms produce, the mix of contemplation and collective fervour that changes how a person hears anything at all.

The trick is that none of it was recorded in a church. Reviewer Daryl Worthington notes that plenty of records are made in consecrated spaces now, but Sunday built this one in what he calls a little home studio in Harlow, Essex, and synthesised the sacred out of thin air.

Each track is anchored by a single motif, whether a burbling sequence or something more vaporous, with shimmer and glassy detail layered around it to imply a much larger space. On "Echoes", pads throb while a metallic arpeggiator surfaces, subsides and returns blurred through echo. "Amen" opens with a voice speaking through delay before an organ swell overtakes it and the words stop being decipherable.

Worthington places the work near the ambient tradition Brian Eno set out in the notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports, then marks where it diverges: specific environments disappear, and what is left is how music bends in the mind rather than in a room.

Compared with Sunday's 2024 album Harmony / Balance, which was shaped by A. C. Bhaktivedanta's translation of the Bhagavad-Gita and carried that text's weight, these tracks are lighter and more direct. The closing piece, "Edge", turns on a plucked pattern the review likens to Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their quietest. The album joins the release calendar at the ambient end of electronic music.