This symphony entitled Obscured Light, in D♭ Major – once described as “a leering key, degenerating into grief and rapture” (Schubart, 1806) – exposits Veil’s sense of mystery, and the fog of memory.  

The formal musical composition has four movements. Veil arranges the instruments and plays the synths and guitars.

I Fantasy of disappearance
II Dirge for obsolete technology
III Fanfare for looping algorithms
IV Rubato of the shuddering heart

He is interested in ghostly figures. As a child in Cold War Britain, living in the Peak District of Yorkshire, he tuned his shortwave radio to military spy stations like the buzzer of UVB-76, the number signals of The Lincolnshire Poacher or the rotor repeats of the Soviet Duga Radar. The piece is laced with these sequences, which eerily echo the language of the design industry, where color, space and time are specified abstractly by integers and fractions. 

The piece includes samples from songs that have possessed Veil, as well as sounds of brass bands, and repetitive cadences of a photocopier and birdsong. Ian McMillan’s short stories about Barnsley are present with the repeated line “the old man with the cardigan and a dog. He’s like a night watchman, the guardian angel of a dirty Northern town” looping throughout. 

The lossless, high resolution music file is here: https://app.box.com/s/0hy19i3ulud4vsse4vtgcm1t46gwizaa