Music

Black-and-white screenshot of an early Macintosh notation program showing a page of score labelled ‘Movement 2 Full Score’, with sparse textures and timing marks. — Early digital workflow: a score page from *Symphony for Cornwall*, executed in a first-generation notation program on an Apple Macintosh.

My work began with acoustic instruments (often alongside recorded sound), shaped by the experimentalism of the 1970s and a long-standing interest in compositional systems. From the mid-1990s onwards, as personal computing became central to music-making, my practice became increasingly digital: not only as a means of production, but as a way of thinking through form, constraint, and listening.

The music ranges from post-minimalist repetition and non-functional tonality to more exploratory, hybrid pieces that combine instruments, electronics, and (at times) image or installation. Special interests frequently provide the material — sometimes intellectual (creative technologies, ’pataphysics, conceptual art), sometimes experiential (synaesthesia, diplacusis, alexithymia). Many works are driven by systems that remain largely inaudible: the rigour is real, even when the surface sounds deceptively simple.

Ian Gardiner once described these pieces as “inscrutable mechanisms”, which still feels apt — although some works deliberately set that aside in favour of a more direct musical address.

In recent years, severe hearing loss has become a central compositional fact. I have responded in two ways: by developing methods and instruments that work with hearing difference, and by composing more traditionally while relying on the inner ear to imagine the resulting sound.

View my compositions
Listen to my recordings
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