We sat down with up and coming musician David Laudicina to discover how he creates his uniquely inspired music. His latest album, Sound of Heaven, miraculously came together in just 30 days. In 2016, at just 21 years of age, David heard the call that forged his destiny-driven resolve. At the Azusa Now gathering in Los Angeles Lou Engle gave a prophecy that spoke directly to David’s drummer heart, “Each move of God began with a sound—with an instrument, and the next move of God will be lead by the drums.” When he said that, David knew he wanted to take part in this new move.
David says, “When I play my instrument, I want something to happen. When I hit a drum, I want someone to be healed. I want somebody to hear God’s voice. I want somebody to hear God say, “I love you.” When I hit a cymbal—for someone to see an angel, or for fire to come down from heaven.”
When you hear his music, you can truly feel an emotion of God that has always been there, but has not been tapped into. We often view God in a solely loving, affectionate, even fluffy, manner. That’s our only viewpoint of who He is. But David wants to tap into the other attributes of God. The goal of this album is to get rid of the God-box completely, so it’s no longer an option to step back into the box—it’s gone. He wants to express God so that we know Him so well that there’s no opportunity to define God by our own cognitive limitation.
David sees God wanting to move in that direction, but understands that we’re often too comfortable where we are. We’re not willing to give up the things that we need to give up in order to move with him. Our eyes and ears have to be opened. As a young musician, he is very aware that God has entrusted him with a huge responsibility to usher in the new age.
Being very straightforward, David needed to know details. If God were to tell him the new sound is like life, or like revival, or something like that, David would just tell God, “That’s pretty vague. Give me more details. I need to know exactly what heaven sounds like.”
He truly desires to be the vessel that can actually make that sound, and the only way that can happen is for him to know exactly what it sounds like. Literally, like what chord would the guitar play that sounds like life? Would it have distortion, would it be clean tone, would he be soloing, would it be more of a pad? On the drums, would it be on the snare, would it be on the toms? There are so many options, that, for David as a musician, he needs to know the specifics. He gets frustrated with the church as a whole because we speak so vaguely. We need to be able to actually hear what heaven sounds like, and bring that exact sound to the earth. We need to be more literal and more specific in what we ask God.
David realized the only way for us to manifest heaven is to know what heaven is doing. For him, it was very important to know what heaven is doing musically. He began to ponder what heaven actually sounds like. God motioned him to scripture, looking up instances where heaven is portrayed, or where God makes himself visible to humans, actually coming down from heaven. He studied what tangible things were really going on. Isn’t it fascinating how we have all this information about heaven and we don’t even know about it because we gloss over the “nitty gritty.”
God prompted David to really take a look at Scriptures, “What do they sound like to you?”
The tracks on Sound of Heaven are the Scriptures David studied. All of them, except Isaiah 40, are instances where someone was taken up to heaven, they see heaven, they see God, or God comes down to earth. Those were the five main passages that he found represented who God really was best. As he read these Scriptures, he came across things he’d never read before, even though he’d read the Scriptures a hundred times. In Revelation 4, the archetypical example of going to heaven, there’s fire, an earthquake. There’s hail. There’s thunder, lightning. There’s billion and billions of angels shouting Holy and singing. There’s angel’s wings flapping as they’re moving around. There’s the sound of the crystal sea, the sound of God’s voice – so many details. There’s all of these sounds noted in various places that you can imagine there is so much noise and so much going on that it would seem unbearably loud. We would probably cover our ears because it would hurt our eardrums if we heard it on earth.
According to David’s analysis, the sound of heaven would cover the entire spectrum of frequency ranges too: bass, mid-range, high—all of them. There would be this huge wash of sound, and it’s loud. Most of us would think that heaven sounds like our soaking music, so this may be a complete revelation like it was for David. Sure there may be “soaking” times in the throne room, but every time someone went to heaven in the bible, it wasn’t that. It was this loud, boisterous sound we may shy away from because it makes us uncomfortable.
So that’s how David started making his music. He watched YouTube videos of storm chasers, for the thunder, wind and other sounds to get the feel for what it would actually be like to visit heaven—to visit the throne room. The closest he could get to actually experiencing that was watching a video of some guy recording a huge storm. Funny, but true. He did that with the fire, with the earthquakes, with the thunder, the hail, everything he could think of. Then, he created music and sounds to emulate that cacophony.
“When you think about it, if all this is going on, and we experienced all of these sounds all at the same time, I don’t think we would have the church that we have today,” David noted. “I think that if every time God gathered us to worship and that happened, I think the church would look very, very different.”
Once he created these sounds and the musical expression to go with them, they tested the album on some audiences, and the testimonies they got were absolutely extraordinary. Specifically the Isaiah 6 track. The testimonies of visions and healings brought forward were more than anything David had ever experienced. That was his longing—Can music actually do this? Can music actually put people in a position where they experience who God really is?
One lady had a spine disease that curved her spine, and during the service her spine literally straightened up. She measured herself when she went home, and she was 2” taller. Through the music, somebody had been cured of asthma. When she came in she could barely breathe, but the moment she heard those drums hit, she felt her lungs open up. One lady hadn’t slept peacefully in 10 years, but that night after she heard this music, she slept for the first time in a decade. The number of visions people shared were absolutely extraordinary. David’s seen God moving in a “crazy amazing,” totally new direction through this album.
Even though there have been a lot of scientific studies on the power of music, it’s so amazing to see how God uses the new sound to prove his power. It’s overwhelming in a very good way. We are so blown away by the anointing of David’s music that we’re using it for the intro and outro of Megamorphosis TV. We believe God is using the magazine to heal people, so layering this powerful sound of heaven is just breathtaking.
It’s this freshness and pointed attention to detail that makes David’s music so moving. You can truly believe it is the authentic sound of heaven when you hear it. We’re moving toward a purity that is so raw and real that nothing impure will stand, and Sound of Heaven is what that shift sounds like. It’s like the vibrations of the music itself brings that shift. The Bible says that the earth groans for the sons of God to be made manifest. David’s music captures that groaning, that anticipation, that warring to bring about the change. It’s a shift back to the way God intended the world to be, and in the midst of the shift, there’s a colliding of sound. It’s magnificent and inspiring, and allows us to access the heavenly realms as the church is waking up and preparing herself to be the bride.
