Biography

I’ve been composing and recording since my teenage years, starting out by making collages of guitar on my Amiga using tracker software and a sampler and carrying out primitive overdubbing experiments by linking two tape decks together. Around 1999, I got hold of a 4-track recorder and began producing cassettes of post-rock–influenced music, inspired by Mogwai and David Pajo’s M projects.

In 2001, I discovered Brian Eno’s ambient experiments (Discreet Music and Music for Airports in particular) which remain lifelong touchstones. Following Eno’s influences led me to the world of experimental music, including Cage, Feldman, Reich, and others. While ostensibly studying for a master’s in Sociology, I was bunking off in the music department library reading about experimental composition (notably Michael Nyman’s classic survey and Reich’s Writings on Music) and poring over Stockhausen scores (I remember requesting the department’s copy of Mikrophonie II which I looked at in vague miscomprehension). My focus shifted from traditional rock instrumentation toward creating gradually changing soundscapes using sound materials assembled and manipulated in the studio which remains my main interest today.

Alongside this, I played in several rock bands, most notably as drummer for The Yell between 2004 and 2010. They were halcyon days travelling around the country in a beaten-up Transit van, playing dingy venues, signing a small indie deal, recording in a real London studio, doing a radio session and releasing a handful of 7” singles and an album. It was a boomtime for that style of indie music and a youthful dream realised, though one I’ve since retired from.

With some trepidation - such terms are always debatable and contestable - I’ve settled on sound artist as an appropriate description of what I do. I also use experimental, in the Cageian sense: composing music where the outcome isn’t fully foreseen. There’s often an element of chance in my work, though I stop short of calling myself an improviser, perhaps lacking the chops to claim that title.

My early work drew almost entirely on instrumental sources - guitars and other acoustic instruments played with varying degrees of skill - but I’ve increasingly embraced field recordings, electronics, and software. I don’t think of what I do as electronica, even though I rely heavily on the computer. My approach aligns more with what Thom Holmes calls “soldering composers,” or what Nic Collins simply calls hacking: building and modifying equipment in the spirit of early electronic composers who got their hands dirty with wires, circuits, and, more recently, code.

In the mid-2000s I immersed myself in circuit bending, scouring charity shops and car boot sales for toys and Casio keyboards to repurpose. I was delighted when my hacked toy voice changer, The Masher, was featured in the second edition of Nic Collins’ Hardware Hacking, the first edition of which had sparked my deeper interest in electronics and the world of Lunetta synthesisers. My current and ongoing project is a large modular synth, loosely inspired by the Buchla 100 and the early, exploratory days of the electronic studio. Some of my builds are documented on the Instruments and Builds page, and I occasionally post updates on my soldering adventures on Instagram.

My music has reached the public through traditional album releases (including those on my early-2000s CDr label Quiet Records) as well as concerts and gallery installations. A comprehensive, if not exhaustive, chronology of works can be found here, and the best place to listen to my fixed works is on Bandcamp.

Beginning in 2010 I was part of the artists in residence programme at Bank Street Arts, an innovative gallery space in Sheffield. Having drifted more and more toward open-ended generative compositions, the opportunity to present pieces as installations which could run for days or weeks as the audience came and went in the gallery was invaluable. Bank Street Arts closed in 2017 but its legacy is documented here.

Between 2012 and 2020, I completed a PhD at the University of Sheffield, researching generative music and the sonification of data as a means of seeding generative processes. My thesis, Sonification as Means to Generative Music, can be read here.

In 2010 I joined as a founder member Sheffield’s premier (and only!) antichoir Juxtavoices, performing widely across the UK and having the privilege of composing a piece for them. As well as appearing as a singer on our releases I contributed electronic textures to Guardian Weekend Remix

As of 2023, I’m a member of Hearing Things, an all-guitar ensemble formed to perform Terry Riley’s In C, now expanding to other works for massed guitars. Our Instagram is here.

I’ve also collaborated with other artists, contributing soundtracks for short films such as Breath and Heart by Jeamin Cha and The Drive by Andrew Conroy. Dancer Elise Knudson used my piece Low Pulses in her performance Third Life, and during my residency at Bank Street Arts I collaborated with fellow resident artists, poets, and historians including Bryan Eccleshall, Angelina Ayers, and Karen Harvey to create multidisciplinary sound-based works.