Just because the Smile are on a prolific run doesn’t mean Jonny Greenwood is about to stop making fancy-pants high art. The Oscar-nominated composer has just announced “268 Years Of Reverb,” a new eight-hour organ composition. The piece will be performed at 2PM on May 18 by James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy at Norwich, UK’s Octagon Chapel as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival.

Greenwood’s statement on the piece:

The organ is the lungs and voice of any building where it is installed. In an old church, air is going through the same organ pipes, in the same space, that other listeners have experienced for centuries. So, hearing church organs is a kind of time travel, the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient sound. In the Octagon Chapel, it’s 268 years of time: season after season spent celebrating, commiserating, praising, mourning, to the same recorded sounds. This time is measured over generations, though the rituals of the church, and is a reminder that churches are the repository for the books of parish records as well as Bibles.

In writing this, I was influenced by the classical Indian approach to melodies, where new notes are introduced very gradually into improvised solos – the arrival of each note is so long-awaited, that its arrival is a revelation of a new world. Knowing this introduces huge tension into the experience of listening to that music. Also, within the drone of the tanpura are the swirling overtones and harmonics that compound the complexity and beauty of the textures. It’s meditative, but not just meditative, because of this tension. Melodies in Indian music are often thought of as circular, rather than linear – you’re climbing on to a moving wheel, not starting and ending in silence.  This is why the first and last chords of X years of reverb incorporate notes below/above audible frequencies. In this way, the music passes across the room as it passes across the audible spectrum, in the same way a rainbow is only the narrow range of the visible spectrum amongst all possible frequencies of light.

The fest is selling tickets for the full performance or for segments of one hour and 50 minutes.