This recording is the result of a promise made by two young musicians in April 2009, when then-resident organist Cindy Castillo invited her favourite chamber music partner, singer Aurélie Franck, to Japan’s Sapporo Concert Hall. The concert included the premiere of the first book of Claude Ledoux’s 'Notizen-Fragmente' (Fragmentary Notes), a work written specially for the two of them, on youthful texts by Rainer Maria Rilke.

At the end of the concert, the artists promised each other that they would continue down this privileged path of performing works inspired by and composed for them and so in March 2012 they persuaded composer Jean-Pierre Deleuze to write a new song-cycle for organ and voice, for inclusion in a concert centred on Angels (and Demons) at the Ars Musica festival. The result was 'Voici l’absence – Cinq déplorations en antiphonie' (Here is Absence – Five Antiphonal Deplorations), a work of deeply poetic, humane music on texts of Baschô, Jacques Crickillon and Henri de Montherlant.