2011 release. Amazing work completed Sept. 2011, an exploration of the music inherent in everyday speech, collected from all kinds of oral sound sources (fishermen, farmers, city-dwellers, etc.), highly processed vocal material between musique concrete & experimental earplay; comes with lovely 64p book

"Encounter in the Republic of Heaven” is a multi channel electro acoustic surround piece where Wishart works with phonemes as a musical phenomena in combination with storytelling. The material is based on recordings of people of all ages, speaking in different dialects and with different individual expressions, freely telling stories.
The 8-channel sound-surround experience begins with the sound of the wind, formed from tens of thousands of human voices, and gradually unfolds the stories of fishermen, farmers and city-dwellers in the North East of England, accompanied by imaginary musical instruments derived directly from the speaking voices we hear. As each story subsides we encounter a sea of human voices organised in surprising ways - speech that waltzes, speech that harmonises, clouds of speech that circle the audience, culminating with speech that transforms into song."