Again, Not Like Before is the second album by The Handel Project. While Everything Rewinds focused primarily on Handel’s operatic arias, this album turns toward another body of work: psalm settings, sacred compositions, biblical dramas, and allegorical works, including Dixit Dominus, Theodora, Saul, Belshazzar, Jephtha, La Resurrezione, and Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno.
Unlike Everything Rewinds, which adapted Handel’s music through a wide range of contemporary musical vocabularies, reflecting the breadth of musical expression across Handel’s own oeuvre, Again, Not Like Before pursues a more unified sonic identity. The album develops a single musical language that synthesizes influences from alternative rock, electronica, trip-hop, slowcore, and pop into a consistent sound world shared across the album.
The project does not seek to reproduce Handel’s original texts or modernize their narratives. Each adaptation begins by identifying the emotional architecture of the source material and rebuilding it through contemporary images, situations, and gestures capable of carrying the same expressive weight.
Across these adaptations, theology becomes imagery. A stream becomes a moment of renewal. Darkness becomes a withdrawal from the world. A summons becomes the return of what has been hidden. Distance becomes a way of seeing. Open hands receive more than they can hold.
The original stories recede, but their emotional logic remains. Many of the works represented here are less concerned with dramatic action than with moments of reflection, recognition, perseverance, dread, loss, release, gratitude, and altered return. Rather than advancing a story, they pause to inhabit a condition. Many of these songs are organized around acts of recognition: the moment when something long present becomes visible.
The title Again, Not Like Before carries two movements at once. It suggests continuity: these songs continue to sing across time. It also suggests transformation: what returns is never simply restored. Together, those meanings define the album’s central movement, from renewal and concealment toward recognition, release, and quiet awakening.
De torrente in via bibet
from Dixit Dominus
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: N/A
Key: C minor
A brief passage from Psalm 110 describes a figure who pauses to drink from a stream during a journey before lifting his head and continuing forward.
Dixit Dominus is a psalm setting rather than a dramatic narrative. The verse appears near the conclusion of a larger vision of struggle, endurance, judgment, and divine authority. In the midst of movement and conflict, a brief act of refreshment becomes the source of renewed strength.
effort → renewal → continuation
The biblical imagery is reduced to its emotional motion. The brook becomes a pause in a larger journey. Drinking becomes renewal. The lifting of the head becomes the decision to continue.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
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This adaptation became an early methodological key for the album. It shows how a short sacred text can be translated without retaining its literal image: the source is not paraphrased, but its sequence of exhaustion, renewal, and continuation remains intact.
With Darkness Deep, as Is My Woe
from Theodora
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Theodora
Key: C minor
Theodora calls upon darkness to conceal her and welcomes death rather than submission and dishonor.
Theodora, a Christian convert living under Roman rule, has refused to participate in pagan rites. Facing imprisonment, humiliation, and execution, she withdraws from the visible world. Darkness becomes both refuge and refusal.
doubt → breach → damage → withdrawal
The religious and dramatic framework is removed. The adaptation focuses on the aftermath of a rupture or realization that cannot be reversed. The central gesture is concealment: drawing the curtain and leaving the light elsewhere.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
The lyric avoids identifying the source of the wound. The far side of night is not simply darkness; it is a chosen distance from exposure, explanation, and the demand to remain visible.
Scenes of Horror, Scenes of Woe
from Jephtha
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Jephtha
Key: G minor
Jephtha foresees the consequences of a vow he has made and imagines the suffering that will follow.
Near the end of the oratorio, Jephtha realizes that a vow made in confidence has placed his daughter Iphis in mortal danger. Fear arrives before catastrophe. The aria is not an account of what has happened, but a vision of what may be approaching.
premonition → dread → anticipation → helplessness
The biblical narrative is removed. The adaptation preserves the experience of anticipating an unnamed disaster. Ordinary time becomes charged with warning even though no visible event has yet occurred.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Unlike Jephtha, the narrator does not know what is feared. The song therefore shifts from tragic knowledge to apprehension without object. Its title preserves that ambiguity.
Recall, O King!
from Belshazzar
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Chorus of Jews
Key: F minor
The captive Jews warn Belshazzar against using sacred vessels from the Temple during a royal feast.
Belshazzar orders holy vessels taken from Jerusalem to be used for profane display. The chorus warns him that inherited power does not remove consequence. The episode foreshadows his downfall and centers on the humbling of pride.
expansion → presumption → boundary → belated recognition
The adaptation preserves the theme of hubris while shifting it to a secular register. The king becomes an unnamed figure who continually expands the scope of his plans, convinced that limits can always be postponed. Judgment becomes a quieter realization: time itself cannot be negotiated with.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
The title names the reality the protagonist fails to acknowledge. The song’s critique is deliberately quiet. It does not stage a dramatic collapse; it shows the slow discovery that the future has already been spent.
Infernal Spirits
from Saul
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: The Witch of Endor
Key: C major
The Witch of Endor invokes supernatural powers to summon the spirit of Samuel on behalf of Saul.
Near the end of Saul, the king is isolated and unable to obtain guidance. Samuel is dead, and Saul turns to the Witch of Endor for forbidden counsel. What returns is not consolation, but a truth Saul has long resisted.
absence → disturbance → return → confrontation
The adaptation reimagines the scene as the return of what has been hidden, suppressed, forgotten, or denied. The ritual structure of the original aria is preserved, but the object of invocation becomes psychological and historical rather than supernatural.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Hidden marks the album’s central pivot. The repeated phrase “still appears” functions as both refrain and revelation. Each stanza names a different mode of disappearance, yet arrives at the same conclusion: what has been removed continues to return.
Infernal Spirits
from Saul
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Instrumental companion to Hidden
Key: C major
This instrumental track follows Hidden and extends its position at the album’s center.
The track is connected to the same source material as Hidden, but it does not introduce a separate textual or dramatic reading. Its function is structural: it holds the album at the threshold opened by the preceding track.
suspension → continuation → wordless emergence
Where Hidden translates the emotional architecture of Handel’s aria into contemporary language, Hidden Still performs the same translation using musical means alone. No new text is introduced. Fragments of the harmonic, melodic, and atmospheric material are allowed to unfold without narrative or explanation.
Hidden Still is not a decorative interlude. It prolongs the moment in which what was concealed begins to surface, but removes language from the process. The result is a musical translation of the album’s central threshold.
Thou, God Most High
from Belshazzar
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Nitocris
Key: E minor
Nitocris reflects upon the permanence and supremacy of God, whose reign extends through all space and time.
Belshazzar recounts the fall of Babylon and the consequences of pride and misplaced confidence. In this aria, Nitocris steps back from immediate events and contemplates a scale against which human greatness diminishes.
vastness → perspective → diminishment → continuation
The theological framework is replaced by the experience of viewing Earth from orbit. Distance alters perception. Cities, coastlines, rivers, mountains, borders, and maps gradually lose definition. The original movement from immensity to humility is preserved through changing scale rather than explicit doctrine.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
The song preserves the source’s contrast between immensity and human scale while replacing theology with observation. Names, borders, and maps become signs of human ordering that lose authority as distance increases.
From Celestial Seat Descending
from Hercules
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Priest of Jupiter
Key: G major
The Priest of Jupiter interprets the descent of a celestial eagle as a sign of divine favor and the power of love.
Hercules has returned victorious, and public celebrations are underway. The appearance of the eagle is read as an omen. The aria develops a classical idea: even divine beings are subject to desire.
elevation → descent → surrender → universality
The mythological framework is removed while preserving the argument. Figures who appear elevated above ordinary life, in rooms of glass and light and towers in the air, ultimately descend into the same attachments and vulnerabilities as everyone else.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
This adaptation remains close to the rhetorical structure of its source. The heavens become glass towers, but the central reversal remains: no elevation grants immunity from attachment.
Your Charms to Ruin Led the Way
from Samson
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Samson
Key: C minor
Samson reflects on the events that led to his capture, blindness, and loss of strength.
In Samson, the imprisoned hero attributes his ruin to the seductive power of Delilah, whose charms won his trust before delivering betrayal. The aria reflects on the forces that transformed his life.
enchantment → expansion → consequence → unresolved continuation
The adaptation reimagines enchantment on a collective scale. The ‘charm’ becomes the promise of progress: the belief that every boundary can be crossed, every distance reduced, and every limit transformed into opportunity.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
The title Siren Song names the force that seduces and exceeds the speaker. Musically, the adaptation departs from Handel’s Larghetto by adopting a cyclical, chaconne-like structure. Repetition and variation reinforce the lyric’s vision of a process that advances while never arriving.
Waft Her, Angels
from Jephtha
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Jephtha
Key: G major
Jephtha calls upon angels to carry Iphis safely beyond earthly suffering.
Near the end of Jephtha, Jephtha believes his vow has condemned his daughter. Having moved from confidence to horror and helplessness, he confronts the necessity of release. The aria transforms grief into a final act of care.
love → loss → release → blessing
The religious framework and image of angels are removed, but the essential gesture is preserved. The adaptation centers on letting go of what one loves, not as abandonment, but as a recognition that holding on may prevent flourishing.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
The lyric deliberately avoids naming what is released. It may be a person, a relationship, an idea, a memory, a child, a project, or a former version of oneself. Release becomes a form of care.
Ecco il sol
from La Resurrezione
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Saint John the Evangelist
Key: A major
Saint John announces the arrival of the sun after darkness and celebrates the triumph of life, light, and renewal.
La Resurrezione depicts the events surrounding Christ’s resurrection. In this scene, the rising sun functions as both literal image and symbol of renewal. An ending becomes a beginning.
return → recognition → renewal → transformation
The religious framework and solar imagery are removed while preserving the movement from absence to renewal. The adaptation focuses on recognizing someone close—a friend? a lover?—returning to a familiar room after a long absence. The person and the place are recognizable, but altered. The cycle begins again, but not in the same way.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
The original announces the return of light to the world. The adaptation reduces that event to a single room and a single encounter. Renewal does not restore the past unchanged. What returns carries the traces of time. The room and the returning figure function as parallel images. Both are familiar, yet both have been altered by time.
Lord, Whose Mercies Numberless
from Saul
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: David
Key: G major
David gives thanks for mercies and blessings beyond counting.
Following his victory over Goliath, David becomes both celebrated and threatened. He receives friendship, protection, opportunity, and guidance while navigating increasingly dangerous circumstances. The aria reflects on generosity that exceeds deserving and exceeds measure.
connection → gift → abundance
The theological framework is replaced by a meditation on kindness, contingency, generosity, and the countless forces that sustain a life. The central word carried forward from the source is not “Lord,” but “numberless.”
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
The image of open hands functions simultaneously as receptivity, gratitude, abundance, and surrender. The song resists possession as the final form of gratitude.
Tu del ciel ministro eletto
from Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno
Music: George Frideric Handel
Original Character: Bellezza
Key: C major
Bellezza asks that the understanding she has gained never leave her.
Il Trionfo is an allegory whose characters are abstractions: Beauty, Pleasure, Time, and Disillusion. By the conclusion, Bellezza recognizes the impermanence of worldly beauty and turns toward a more enduring understanding.
revelation → awakening → clarity → alignment
The allegorical and theological framework is removed while preserving the moment of realization. Distance becomes the central metaphor. What was obscured by proximity, noise, and confusion briefly comes into focus.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Unlike the certainty offered by the original allegory, the clarity described here remains fragile and temporary. The song asks only that the awakening hold its place a little longer.