Pet Shop Boys: new album dedicated to Alan Turing on the way

Pet Shop Boys will release their new album “A Man From The Future” on October 9th via Parlophone, an eight-chapter work dedicated to the life, thought and legacy of Alan Turing. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe created the project with Andrew Hodges, biographer of the British mathematician and author of “Alan Turing: The Enigma”.
The work was originally written in 2012 and staged two years later with the Bbc Concert Orchestra. For this release, the duo reworked the material, giving more prominence to the electronic component, revising the orchestral parts and updating some sections of the spoken text.

The album traces Turing's life chronologically, from his school years and the birth of his passion for mathematics and science, through his growing awareness of his own homosexuality, his studies at Cambridge and his work at Bletchley Park. There, Turing played a decisive role in cracking the codes of the Enigma machine during the Second World War, as well as paving the way for the development of the digital computer and early thinking on artificial intelligence.
The final section deals with the legal persecution he suffered over a homosexual relationship, his death in 1954, and the posthumous rehabilitation of his reputation. The eighth track includes an excerpt from the speech in which Gordon Brown, in 2009, acknowledged Turing's contribution to the Allied victory and issued a formal apology on behalf of the British government for how he had been treated.

The music combines electronics and strings, with arrangements by Sven Helbig performed by the Manchester Camerata Octet. Four tracks also feature young singers from the Manchester Grammar School choir, while actress Juliet Stevenson provides the narration running through the album, drawn from Hodges' book. “The reason we wanted to make this piece was to create a musical memorial to Alan Turing, who gave so much to his country and the world and was repaid by being persecuted for his sexuality,” explain Tennant and Lowe. “Alan made an enormous contribution to Germany's defeat in the Second World War and was a computing pioneer, envisioning a world with intelligent computers. He also looked ahead to a future in which being gay would be accepted as something normal. In both his professional and private life, he was ahead of his time.”

Here's the tracklist for “A Man From The Future”:

1. Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know
2. He Dreamed Of Machines
3. The Enigma
4. Other Ranks
5. The Memory And The Control
6. The Trial
7. Only In His Death
8. A Man From The Future

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