Oran Mor composed by Scott Twynholm

Audio description and transcript

The track starts with stately, yearning music that gently expands in volume and sounds as though it’s echoing around a large space such as a large hall or cathedral. After about 20 seconds Alasdair’s voice joins the music:

“I’ve always felt that stories and pictures were a way of keeping people I knew alive and as they were. The portraits for instance, you know that, that [laughs] show people young and middle aged, long after they’re dead! And keep them remembered long after they’re forgotten, I hope. And the same if you make people characters in stories.

Anybody who has seen a lot of my work… book illustrative designs, mural paintings, will find certain faces and figures keep coming up in them. Certain symbolic or emblematic figures, like the winged embryo inside the skull, which for me is a way of reconciling life and death. Because I’m showing that death contains new life and, well life punches through death to take on a new form.

Many such figures I use and recycle. And many mottos. ‘Work as if you lived in the early days of better nation!’ I got that from Dennis Lee, a Canadian poet. And it seemed to me such a good idea. Such a good way of approaching your own work. Seeing yourself as, as something early! And something that could be made better.”

Alasdair stops talking and the music rises and swells briefly before slowly fading to a gentle close.