Scottish artist Susan Philipsz created five sound pieces, which were played before film screenings at the UGC Cinema, Broad Street. Philipsz transposed the recordings onto blank 35mm film each piece was an intervention into the familiar programme of advertisements, trailers and feature films and referred to scenes from classic or cult films. The artist’s intention was not to recreate identical soundtracks but for these songs to sound similar, suggesting a distant memory of a scene, a place or a sense of solitude and opening it up to new interpretations. By presenting the works with no visual element, a different experience developed from the usual encounter with film.

Philipsz chose five different musical forms, that included, her unaccompanied solo voice featured in Leaning on the Everlasting Arms from Night of the Hunter and Tomorrow Belongs to Me from Cabaret. Matt Willard whistled Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King from the opera Peer Gynt, which is used in the film M to characterise the role of the murderer played by Peter Lorre. Also used was From Once upon a Time in America, in which musician Andrea Merentza played Deborah’s Theme on viola and finally on tuba Johannes Kölbel recreated the sound of a horn from The Vikings.