15 April 2012
To the Barbican to see and hear Gavin Bryars’s ‘The Sinking of The Titanic’. He takes a line of music from a tune we know the small string orchestra played on the ship as it sank, and repeats it for more than an hour, overlaying sound effects of docks and liners, the waves and the long ship’s wake, morse code, the noise of icebergs calving, all combining to convey the strange ethereal effect of the ship sinking down, down beneath the waves, creaking metal, watery echoes.
Accompanied throughout by a film projected on giant screens in black and white edited from contemporary footage – faces and figures smiling mutely from another age, so far distant and yet so upsetting. A haunting, insistent and poignant soundworld.
Books & Boots 
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