Hi!

We are Stephanie Lamprea and Alistair MacDonald, and we've recently recorded a collection of music in an album called Ecstatic Visions which we would like to release on a CD.

This project, which has been very meaningful and important to us, began at the 2023 Glasgow Cathedral Festival. GCF commissioned Alistair a new work for voice and electronics, and we performed it in concert within the crypt of the Cathedral. The concert also included a new work by Robert Laidlow, commissioned by Jesus College, Oxford. These two fantastic works - Ecstatic Visions, and Post-Singularity Songs - explore creation myths and human transformation into the visionary.

With help from colleagues and friends, we have recorded these works alongside three wonderful compositions by Wende Bartley, Angélica Negrón, and Eric Chasalow, and we're now excited to share the music with you!

Neuma Records, an international record label championing contemporary classical music by intrepid artists, are keen to release this album with us. To make this happen, we really need your support for this adventure. Via GoFundMe, you can help us by supporting the remaining costs of CD production, marketing, distribution, and more. An easy (and financially manageable!) way to take part in this is to pre-order a digital or physical copy of the CD for yourself via GoFundMe! By doing this you will also be listed as a supporter of the disc in the digital album booklet credits. :-)

Thank you for your consideration in becoming a supporter of this project - we are extremely grateful for your donation and your part in making this CD release possible!

Donation tiers

£10 donation: Receive a digital release of Ecstatic Visions, plus your name listed as a supporter in the album digital booklet

£20 donation: Receive a physical release of Ecstatic Visions, Digital release of Ecstatic Visions, plus our name listed as a supporter in the album digital booklet

£50 donation: Receive a voice lesson or artist career consultation from Stephanie (in person or online), a physical release of Ecstatic Visions, Digital release of Ecstatic Visions, plus our name listed as a supporter in the album digital booklet

Delivery of donation rewards: February 2026

Or, feel free to donate any amount that works for you! Any donation goes along way to making this project possible!

About the album

Ecstatic Visions is an album of new and recent works for voice and electronics, performed by Stephanie Lamprea and Alistair MacDonald. The record explores the creation of myths, visions, and personal confessions, sourcing texts from as far back as mystics Hildegard von Bingen and Juana Inés de la Cruz all the way to post-singular AI-generated texts, situating historical figures and modern technology together as oracles and worldbuilders.

Angélica Negrón: Letras para cantar

Alistair MacDonald (and Hildegard von Bingen): Ecstatic Visions

Wende Bartley: Ellipsis

Eric Chasalow: 'The Fury of Beautiful Bones' from The Furies

Robert Laidlow: Post-Singularity Songs

Angélica Negrón’s Letras para cantar is an atmospheric and sensual setting of poetry by Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century writer, philosopher, composer, poet, and nun from Central America nicknamed "The Tenth Muse" by contemporary critics. Originally composed for ModernMedieval, this arrangement features three voices (all recorded by Lamprea) and fixed media.

Alistair MacDonald’s Ecstatic Visions forges the sounds of Glasgow Cathedral’s great bell with Hildegard von Bingen’s writings on gemstones and healing, a letter to a Benedictine monk, her visions, and two of her antiphons, in a series of kaleidoscopic, multi-channel illusions. Hildegard was revered not only as a nun, but a ‘visionary, mystic, healer, linguist, poet, artist, musician, playwright, biographer, theologian, preacher and spiritual counsellor’ (Priscilla Throop) and has been described as the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

Wende Bartley’s Ellipsis maps the three stages of the moon (waxing, full, and waning), in association with three archetypes of woman (virgin, mother, and crone), in a ‘ritual celebration of spiritual power, rooted in the ancient traditions of lunar mythology... chronicling the spiritual and psychological empowerment of woman’s collective consciousness as it has evolved through time: The Age of Darkness, Creating a New Space, and The Age of Resonance.’ (Bartley, Ymx média).

Eric Chasalow’s “The Fury of Beautiful Bones” comes from his cycle The Furies. Setting poetry by Anne Sexton, this work explores the complexity of loss of love and endurance of the body and memory through the personification of bones.

Robert Laidlow’s Post-Singularity Songs is a set of artefacts and stories from this world. At its heart is a creation myth, which tells of how the world began, what reality is made of, and how the beings inside it came to be conscious. Much of the text is derived from conversations with the worldbuilding AI and from a specially created poetry-generating AI called GPT-Pyron. Returning certain ideas continually such as the sun, dust, death, time, and free will, Laidlow develops the results of GBT-Pyron further through poetry by Emily Dickinson and John Donne.