In 2017, Fieri commissioned a piece from Ben Rowarth in response to the Musica Transalpina anthology of Italian madrigals published in 1588. We recorded the resulting piece ‘A Short Walk’ for our second album ‘The Unknown Traveller’. This album explores the concept of journeying, language and the ways in which we interact with it and each other.

In 2021, we received support from the Genesis Foundation to commission a new silent film. Inspired by recent refugee crises, identity politics, and homelessness, this music-film collaboration follows the journey of an old man living alone, as he travels mentally, physically and spiritually through the four chapters of music in search of home.

Loneliness and isolation has become ever more present in people’s lives and future-facing art should reflect that. The music uses multiple tonality to represent individuals striving to escape from loneliness by seeking out others, only to find that same sense of isolation in the anonymity of being within a collective. For example, the first movement begins with all eight parts singing in different tonal areas. In the second, the individual parts move closer together. By the third, they have formed two choirs, in tune with themselves but clashing against each other. Finally in the fourth, they become trapped in the same tonality.