Thom Gould explores music for strings, electronics and tape, in which past and present are brought into riveting focus, culminating in Different Trains.

Documentary speech informs the very music of this iconic quartet, in which Reich imagines two trains moving simultaneously: one carrying his child self across the United States between his divorced parents, one bearing children to the death camps of Nazi Germany. Mark Bowden sets up a very different journey in his dance piece, Lines written a few miles below, saturated with sounds of the London Underground, while Van der Aa’s Memo forms an intricate duet between violin and tape recorder. Cellist Oliver Coates will perform Michael Gordon’s extraordinary study in distortion, Industry, of which the composer has written, ‘I had this vision of a 100-foot cello made out of steel suspended from the sky…’.