Machinations 1928 is loosely inspired by Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist play Machinal, in which a Young Woman struggles to cope with the everyday reality of life in a cold, mechanised society. In the play, despite the prosperity and social progress often associated with the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the Young Woman’s reality is one where she feels suffocated by all the things that she is expected to enjoy in life – work, home, motherhood, love.

Machinations 1928 is designed to reflect this convey this juxtaposition, where people lived only superficially lived in world of jazz, booze and joy, when the reality for many at the time was a society pervaded by patriarchal values, rampant commercialisation and an industrial harshness that failed to care for individual human beings. This can be heard in the music’s shifting between the relaxed, bluesy opening material, and the much more dissonant, frantic, contrasting second theme.