My father is just recovering from an eye operation, so I’ve popped over to the Lake District in the north of England to keep him company for a week or two. A 30 hour flight was the perfect time to compose the most filmic music that I’ve planned for the installation … and here’s a mock-up.

As I may have mentioned before, the plan for the main sailor’s dining space is to remember the tragic 1964 sinking of HMAS Voyager, resulting in 82 deaths and a terrible, life-altering experience for those who survived. Here I’m responding to Hamish’s desire to emotionally engage in a filmic way with the story … drawing on the music of Philip Glass and adding sampled strings and a live piano player to the Ensemble Offspring line-up. I have done some harmonic re-composing, too, but not from our playlist this time. Instead, I looked at the music that was in the charts at the time of the actual disaster, from the US, Britain and Australia, and used portions that I transcribed from several different songs as the basis for the whole piece (which eventually will be longer).