Recorded by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conducted by Terry Davies, this score blends elements from across the classical genre, to create a memorable and enigmatic album.

Co-directed by Jim Sutherland and Bafta winning filmmaker Morgan McKinnon, ‘When Fish Began To Crawl’ is a film about the climate crisis and humanity’s deep relationship with nature.

I have an enduring memory of lying on the edge of sleep in my childhood home, off the grey coast of Caithness, listening to the several foghorns of the Pentland firth. I would study them carefully trying to decipher a pattern as they called to one another. The foghorns differed in pitch, frequency and distance, phasing against each other with harmonic shifts shaped by the elements in the vast foggy seascape.

The music creates patterns in the apparently random chaos of nature to evoke the changing qualities of light on the Caithness landscape, and the tidal currents of the Pentland Firth that flow between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, or the sound of a curlew carried in the wind across the dhu lochans of the flow country. The tick-tock of the criticality alarm, at Dounreay nuclear power station, which is broadcast 24/7 over a speaker to let the workers know that all is ok, only to fall to a horrifying silence if there is a problem. That silence is significant and although the sounds that carry across the great flat plains of Caithness have a particular quality, most important of all is the sense of space and the silence. I explore different ways of using sound to represent its absence. – Jim Sutherland