Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation August 1st 1984 (2015)

An auditory meditation on the fate of Lindow Man, a ‘bog body’ discovered in Cheshire in 1984 and currently on display in the British Museum. The first movement makes a ‘Petition for Reinterment’, reflecting the artist’s position on the ethics of disinterment, and the disruption of a centuries-old compact between human remains and the substance of the earth itself. The music itself seems to be a hymn to decomposition — being subjected to the kinds of processes that often cause the bones of bog bodies to decompose.

The second movement, ‘To Your Fox-Skin Chorus’, is an allusion to the fox-fur arm covering worn by Lindow Man, and to the idea of the fox as a soul-guide or psychopomp.

The final movement, ‘Canis, Ursus, Lynx: Awake, Arise, Reclaim’ is a summoning call to the bones of animals made extinct by human agency, and an urgent musical plea, not simply for ‘rewilding’, but for redress — for animals to retake the British archipelago with great violence.