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Michael Gordon’s 1997 string orchestra work, Weather, is brought to life in a musical tour-de-force — a brand new collaboration between the UK’s Manchester Collective, award-winning BBC documentary sound artist Chris Watson and Spanish filmmaker Carlos Casas.

On Thursday October 13 the Manchester Collective premieres a video of their collaboration. Combining live performance, field recordings and film, the collaborators transport the audience from an East Asian rainforest to the world’s oldest desert; from an Icelandic glacier to the sunken medieval town of Dunwich off the English coast.

For Gordon, Weather was inspired by the chaotic scheme of weather patterns. He wondered how these might transfer musically, as if the past several hundred years of musical ideas were swirling around and he was able to ideas as he liked to build on them.

Gordon continues:

I imagined history as being not so much like a timeline, but like an elevator where I could stop at whatever floor I wanted, and everything was going on simultaneously. The elevator went up to eight, where I found Vivaldi, who of course wrote a massive string piece based loosely on the same subject. Then I went down to the fourth floor, where I found Jimi Hendrix, back up to nine for some 1990’s London club music, then to five for the noise of battleship sirens.