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The perfect music for a winter’s afternoon, the idea for this piece came from a chapter in Rabelais’ novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. Whilst traveling towards the North Pole, Rabelais describes seeing letters of the alphabet frozen in the sky. As he approaches, the letters melt and thaw to form words and phrases.

Sawer also draws on his research on Omyakon, a remote village in eastern Siberia which holds the record for the coldest place on earth (temperatures having been recorded as low as -71C) and read in a Lonely Planet entry: "At such times, according to local lore, if you shout to a friend and they can't hear you, it's because all the words have frozen in the air. But when spring comes, all the words thaw and if you go back at the right time you can hear everything that was said months ago."