Autobiographical Statement

Third Person Version | Short Version

My early musical experience was learning to play guitar. Like many other 90s teenagers, I was learning Nirvana and Metallica riffs and playing imaginary concerts in our parents' garages. I spent as much time thinking about recording equipment as I did practising, and I was interested in sound engineering, effects pedals, production and the way records were made. One of my earliest electronic projects was building a guitar pre-amp from a magazine article in my uncle's electronics workshop. I started composing and recording my own material, making collages of guitar on my Amiga using tracker software and an 8-bit sampler and carrying out primitive overdubbing experiments by linking two tape decks together.

In 1999, I got hold of a 4-track recorder as a birthday present and began producing cassettes of post-rock-influenced music, inspired by Mogwai and David Pajo's M projects. These were my first forays into music that prioritised texture and soundworld over traditional lyric-driven songwriting.

In 2001, I discovered Brian Eno's ambient experiments, such as Discreet Music and Music for Airports, which remain lifelong touchstones. Reading liner notes and interviews with Eno led me to explore the wider world of experimental music, including Cage, Feldman, Reich and others. While studying Sociology, I was frequently bunking off in the music department library reading about experimental composition (memorably Michael Nyman's classic survey and Reich's Writings on Music) and poring over Stockhausen scores, requesting the department's copy of Mikrophonie II, which I looked at in vague miscomprehension.

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. While my early work drew almost entirely on instrumental sources, mainly guitars and other acoustic instruments played with varying degrees of skill, I've increasingly embraced field recordings, electronics and software. My focus shifted toward creating gradually changing soundscapes using these materials and remains my main interest today.

Eno's descriptions of ambient and generative music, together with John Cage's ideas of indeterminacy and the notion that a composer might design a system rather than determine every detail of a piece, suggested possibilities that I've been exploring ever since. My interest in building my own generative systems drew me toward questions about what might drive them. Weather forecasts, financial markets and other live data sources seemed particularly appealing because they connected the music to events unfolding beyond the studio. 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 such systems. My thesis, Sonification as a Means to Generative Music, can be read here.

To realise my ideas, I became increasingly interested in the practical side of electronic music making and in creating my own tools. My approach aligns 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 ongoing project in this area is a large modular synthesiser, loosely inspired by the Buchla 100 and the early, exploratory days of the electronic studio. Some of my builds are documented on my Instruments and Builds page, and I occasionally post updates on my soldering adventures on Instagram.

Recently I've returned to the ideas explored during my PhD by presenting works through web audio. Revisiting them through contemporary browser technologies has become something of an ongoing endeavour, involving equal measures of composition, software development and archaeology. It has yielded both new versions of works from my PhD portfolio and further explorations of generative and data-driven music.

I had a parallel life playing in several rock bands, most notably as the drummer for The Yell between 2004 and 2010. We briefly lived the dream, travelling around the country in a beaten-up Transit van, playing dingy venues, appearing in the NME, 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. I can joke that I am a retired rock star.

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

As of 2023, I'm a member of Hearing Things, an all-guitar ensemble originally formed to perform Terry Riley's In C and now expanding into other works for massed guitars.

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. I've contributed soundtracks to films including 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. A comprehensive, if not exhaustive, chronology of works can be found here, and the best place to hear my fixed-media work 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 works as installations that could run for days or weeks was invaluable. It was also an unusually fertile environment for collaboration, leading to projects with fellow resident artists, poets and historians including Bryan Eccleshall, Angelina Ayers and Karen Harvey. Bank Street Arts closed in 2017 but its legacy is documented here.

From Amiga trackers and DIY guitar pre-amps to modular synthesisers and data-driven musical systems, the thread connecting much of my work has been a curiosity about how sounds are made, shaped and set in motion.