Vol.1 a curious dance // 


Our debut recording is a conceptual retelling of the patient ballroom dances that took place at Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) throughout the 19th century. It is a blurred lines composition, in which the two sets of pipes speak to and layer upon one another almost like the right and left hand of a piano, rather than two distinct instruments. The intention is that the listener is caught between ‘who is playing what’, inspired by a line in Charles Dickens’ journal, The Uncommercial Traveller, where, walking passed the Bethlem Hospital in Southwark he commented, “Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?’ – a remark that sums up the wrongs of delineating the ‘affected’ from the ‘unaffected’.