Mick Harvey will release his first soundtrack in ten years with Waves of ANZAC / The Journey via Mute / [PIAS]on 3 April 2020.
The album features two recent soundtracks to powerful subject matters recorded by Mick Harvey. The first, Waves of Anzac looks at Sam Neill’s personal family history interwoven with the history of the First World War and the ANZACs through to the modern era while the second, The Journey, is a four-part composition released in support of #KidsOffNauru, a campaign working for the child refugees and people seeking asylum who find themselves in offshore detention.
Waves of ANZAC is represented by 13 tracks selected from the score for the ABC documentary on forgotten war stories and lives lost. The documentary is a personal history by the actor Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, The Piano) set against a contemporary increasingly divided political backdrop. ‘Why ANZAC? with Sam Neill’ (Dir. Kriv Stenders, 2015) is named for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who served together in the Gallipoli Campaign, their first engagement in World War I and continued as a military unit until after WW2. The film is a look at this pivotal point in our shared history, and the impact it still has on a personal and on a geopolitical level. Harvey recently examined this period via the prism of a fictional soldier/poet for his collaboration with Christopher Richard Barker, The Fall and Rise of Edgar Bourchier and the Horrors of War.
The Journey is a four-part composition, recorded with The Letter String Quartet, in support of people seeking asylum who have found themselves in Australia’s offshore detention program. The piece was composed as a study of the hardships endured by the detainees on Nauru, Manus Island and Christmas Island before and during their internment and as an expression of hope for a humane outcome to their plight.
Waves Of ANZAC
1. Turkish Theme
2. Waves of ANZAC
3. First Anniversary
4. The Somme
5. Archives
6. Poppies
7. The Lovells
8. The Cemetery
9. Modern War
10. Vietnam
11. Crete
12. Back at Kiatora
13. Return to Anzac Cove
The Journey
with The Letter String Quartet
Part 1: Conflict
Part 2: All at Sea
Part 3: Capture (Not Real Refugees)
Part 4: Hope
