Having toured Europe's theatres soundtracking an avant-garde silent classic, Jason Swinscoe's Cinematic Orchestra has changed tack for their first album in four years.

The band - formed by Jason in 1999 - is set to release Ma Fleur next month, their soundtrack to a film which hasn't yet been made.

"After finishing the Man With a Movie Camera tour, we wanted to find a new way to have a visual influence for the new record," says Jason.

"I was more interested in working with someone while writing the music, rather than working with an artefact from 1929. I wanted to work with something a little more flexible."

While on a planned break from touring to spark off the creative juices, he got in touch with an old college friend, Gavin McGrath, who was working as an art director for a London-based advertising agency.

Jason sent him some of the music he had been working on and asked him to have a listen and see what he thought.

"He came back three weeks later with a rough outline of a script," says Jason.

"I was completely inspired by that. I had the foundations for the music but I was able to add much more detail in the melody and harmony and arrangements."

The film, which tells the story of three different characters whose lives criss-cross and overlap, is currently being developed.

"It's pretty much a story of life," he adds. "The interesting part, which still needs developing, is the depth of the personality given to the characters, and how they interact.

"It is about love and loss and education, and about everything we do in a broad sense that resonates with us, the things that make us open up and share our most inner feelings."

In order to add depth to the characters in the story, Jason invited three different singers onto the album - Patrick Watson, who is currently touring with the band; Lou Rhodes, formerly of Lamb; and soul legend Fontella Bass.

Fontella provided the vocals for the band's latest single Breathe, backed up by the lush cinematic strings and the piano which characterise the band's sound.

The band has produced a series of photographs to go with the new album, which will act as a kind of storyboard to the finished product, which are set to be animated for the band's forthcoming London show at the Barbican.

Anyone curious to find out more should listen to the band's last single, To Build a Home, which Jason describes as "a synopsis" of the whole story.

"It's like a false start on the record," he reveals. "One thing I really liked about Michael Gondry's film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was the wayit was all mixed up and messed around in the form.

"It didn't actually start at the beginning."

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