In 1995, Paul Sirvatka was director of the St. Petronille Contemporary Choir at St. Petronille Parish in Glen Ellyn, IL.  That fall, the choir gathered in the studio to record the choir’s first and only album under his directorship.  The album was ambitious.  It featured 12 songs performed in an incredible variety of styles, ranging from simple 4-part a cappella, jazz, Gregorian Chant, orchestra ensemble — even blistering, straight-ahead rock.

But produced in an exhausting, three-week sprint, on a shoestring budget, there were limitations on how fully the vision of the project could be realized.

Many of the songs sounded like a product of the time in which they were produced.  In those days, if you had one synthesizer with hundreds of sounds, chances are you used it for anything and everything you could think of.  It was a rich sound for the time, but with the incredible advances in audio technology and sampling since then, the original album came to sound more and more dated as the years went by.

In the winter of 2017, Paul Sirvatka and former St. Petronille Contemporary Choir member Matt MacPhail met at Undisclosed Location Studios in Arlington, VA, Matt’s home base, to tinker around with the idea of updating a song or two just for fun.  Over a first initial week of work, it slowly became clear what was possible: update not just one or two songs on that original album — but every song on the album — with new performances by stellar musicians and the full weight of over two decades of advances in digital audio technology, sampling, and restoration.

The end result is a new, Special Edition of this classic album that is both updated for current listeners and just as timeless as ever.