Wolfson and Saunders, both of European-Jewish descent, formed Towering Inferno in 1985 as an "ambient, techno and heavy metal" multimedia stage project that involved electronics and film.

In 1986 they met Hungarian performance poet Endre Szkárosi in Italy at the Bologna Festival and were impressed by his cryptic works which challenged Communist dictatorship and explored European identity.

The choral segments, which had previously been taped with Kenneth Bowen, their conductor, were sampled, rearranged and played back in the dome to be recorded with the added reverb.

Wolfson recalled that when they were taping Szkárosi reciting a poem of his over the London Welsh Chorale for "Sto Mondo Rotondo", a thunderstorm broke over the city, and they opened the studio doors to let in the sound of the storm.

The prayer was recorded by Saunders on a Casio DA3 DAT, and he remarked that "it was spoken in the rare and beautiful Transylvanian dialect, and he graciously gave his permission for it to be used on the album".

[5] Towering Inferno experimented constantly with the sound on the album's tracks to create the right atmosphere they wanted, and they tried a number of fuzz boxes on the guitars and other instruments.

The metallic sound on "Reverse Field" was achieved by an Ibanez Roadstar guitar with a RAT distortion pedal fed through a Roland 301 Space Echo.

[5] When Brian Eno heard the album he expressed his admiration for it,[3] and this enabled Inferno's manager to sign a contract with Island Records, which released Kaddish globally in 1995.

This elevated their performances from the underground circuit to concert halls and opera houses around the world,[4] including shows across Europe in Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest and Moscow.

[4] Mojo magazine said Kaddish deploys a wide range of musical genres, and including minimalist ambient, metal, classical piano, string quartets and jazz, and called it "a sonic tapestry of thousands of years, lamenting what is lost in periods of great destruction.

[3] In a Richard Wolfson obituary, The Daily Telegraph said that Towering Inferno was "one of the most original and provocative performance-art bands of the 1990s", and described Kaddish as "a shocking and unforgettable piece".

[3] In another Wolfson obituary, The Guardian called the work "a complex and disturbing meditation on the Shoah that makes Steve Reich's Different Trains seem simplistic in comparison".