A cross-genre composition for piano, strings, with spokenword
and electronic soundscapes.

This cinematic composition establishes the album’s creative
aesthetic: the sound palette, characters, narrative, mood and
dramatic themes.

– Story –

Alone at night, waiting, praying, playing card games of Solitaire
and writing letters, Mirla becomes truly intimate with hope: a
fervent, desperate wish that Arthur is alive.

– Conversation Notes –
Prelude Solus orientates the listener, establishing the time, place
and mood. The prelude begins with a declaration of love, a
telegram, and an event like a blow upon an open wound.

At the outset, we gain insight of Mirla’s psychological pain.
We’re introduced to the album’s inventiveness and soundscapes,
and the story’s dramatic tension and cinematic heft.

Applying a spoken-word device (with two narrator voices, both
performed by the composer) the story is told, first, through the
reading of letters from a young Mirla Wilkinson to her
sweetheart sailor-boy, Arthur Bancroft: the second, by an older
Mirla, reflecting on the “the seasons of the stiff upper-lip… the
time I became truly intimate with hope”.

Across the album are footsteps, ticking clocks, a creaking desk,
a scribbling pen, spoken-word excerpts from letters and original
poetry. The piano and string arrangements shift from romantic,
tender, fragile and melancholic to dark, moody, tense, then
uplifting and resolving.

The field recordings from the actual places of my grandparents
life, with recordings of thunder storms, rain and wind, insects,
birds, Fremantle wharf and a whole range of atmospheric
textures to create mood, emote the listener and help tell the story
in an authentic way.