Pavement Saints by Mournel

# PAVEMENT SAINTS

We collected these sounds over eighteen months of twilight pilgrimages—wandering where the city's neglect bleeds into forgotten burial grounds. These are not fabricated atmospheres but genuine moments captured in the liminal spaces where concrete crumbles back into earth and where names carved in stone fade beneath layers of moss and spray paint.

The Sinkyard called to us again. That flooded necropolis where memory warps and bloats. But this time, we followed the water's path outward, tracing how it seeps through cracked foundations and up through broken pavement. We discovered how the buried and the abandoned speak the same language—a dialect of slow decay and stubborn persistence.

Our recorders caught footsteps crunching over shattered glass, rain drumming against hollow metal chambers, distant alarms warped by fog. In condemned subway tunnels, we stretched canvas to catch the drip of century-old moisture. We pressed piezo mics against iron gates, feeling them vibrate with distant traffic that mimicked the toll of forgotten bells.

One evening in November, we witnessed a homeless man performing his own private ritual at a collapsed mausoleum that had been partially converted into a shelter. He was carefully tracing faded names with his finger while muttering what sounded like prayers. The fragile beauty of this moment—this perfect collision of the Gravekeepers' duty with urban survival—haunts "Names Unwritten" and became the emotional core around which the entire album revolves.

"Pavement Saints" is our most resonant work—ten tracks that drift between gentle sorrow and moments of cathartic intensity. The pump organ creaks beneath layers of static. Field recordings dissolve into bowed metal and broken equipment feedback. Each piece captures a specific location where the past refuses to yield, where memory stubbornly persists despite every attempt to pave it over.

We invite you to listen in solitude, preferably at dusk when the boundaries between worlds grow thin. These are not songs but vigils—patient observations of how silence fills abandoned spaces and how, if you listen carefully, you can still hear the names the grass refuses to cover.

We listen for graves breathing and make those sounds into music. Forgotten crypts, drowned tombstones, moss-swallowed bones—our recorders capture what lies under silence. Memory refuses to vanish. We preserve what whispers from broken stones.