A group of friends take refuge in an island hotel decorated for New Year's. The problem is, it's early summer, and soon enough, even the walls themselves are striking out against them.

This fairy-tale-like drama, based on a 1904 short story by American poet and feminist author Renée Vivien, tells two opposing versions of the same narrative: one told verbally by Pierre Lenoir, a male narrator at a Victorian dinner party; the other told visually through the behavior of an unnamed woman who meets him on a fantasy cargo boat. The intercutting of the two stories creates a tension between the different world views of the woman and the man.

Several years after the battle of Waterloo, a former soldier from Shoreditch sits in a London inn reminiscing about the brave and determined officer who took him to hell and back. The narrator is Rifleman Cooper, and the officer whose fame he recalls is the legendary Richard Sharpe.

Since 1983, Bow Gamelan Ensemble have inspired generations of artists with their radical practices and explosive performances. Charged with their individual virtuosity in performance art, avant-garde music and kinetic sculpture, their sound installations and performances are immersed in an orchestra of instruments made from scrap metal, electric motors, river barges and domestic objects including glass sheets, light bulbs and fireworks.

Two disc jockeys have a friend's murder to solve in the fringe-group melting pot of 1977 London.