From "The Shape of A Note"

"The music is built on a single sample, a small moment of orchestral music captured from the radio, and played with one finger. The sound plays forwards and then reaching the end reverses, playing backwards to the start where it begins again. This alternating loop holds a melody but by constant repetition and reversal the individual notes are blurred into a drone -- a single complex sustained note. The loop fades in very slowly at the start of the piece and fades away again just as stealthily, implying that the music has no start or end and we are hearing only a section of an infinite sound.
...
The lines are from the 1927 musical Show Boat, music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. This was the first musical play with a serious intent, and is justly honoured for it. But until this year I actually had no idea where the voices originated, as they were sampled at random from broadcast. In adapting the work for public performance I've taken a number of early 20th century performances of the song and blended them together so that no one artist is used. In Show Boat, the lines are from a love duet. Placed next to the slowly evolving orchestral loop they sound mournful. In this context they have the quality of a spiritual, and seem to ask, 'how much longer?'
...
As Isaac Asimov said, "... whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse."
...
As much as popular heaven is an eternally happy place, there is also confinement and a lack of emotional range. I needed to have smiles, but the kind of smiles that felt the strain of eternity. It took some time to find something that resonated, which turned out to be the celebrations at the end of World War 1. On 11 November 1918 the great powers declared an armistice, and in Paris people came out onto the streets to cheer 'the end of all wars'. They were happy but have the haggard look of people who had lived through suffering. By greatly slowing the speed of the film to match the music I force the gaze of the people on screen. They seem to stare at you for too long and their shouts and smiles seem strange. The process by which the film is slowed down is imperfect -- it works by finding find common elements in the frames and in such old and jumpy footage it often fails, causing unworldly distortions of the image. I finally decided to run the opening scene backwards, so that their bodies would seem to float unnaturally."