This music was planted on a ¼ inch audio tape in the Earth, Spring 2021. All digital copies were deleted. The hunt to find the hidden tape was under pressure by one fact of nature: in a few years, it will completely decompose, the music will be lost forever and only ever exist in the memories of the artists who made it.

It was found, Autumn 2022. It was digitised and rescored with new artefacts of sound incorporated. The music has been released exactly as it sounds from the Earth. Composed, decomposed then recomposed by nature.

Featuring excerpts from poems by George Mackay Brown, Erland Cooper’s concerto is injected by the natural landscapes of Orkney. It asks questions about the journey from life to death, and whether art exists if it is only a memory.

The story in this score is both beautiful and deeply tragic.

This is what we heard.