Caja De Huesos translates as ‘Box Of Bones’, and this particular Box Of Bones is a collection of old songs written at various times between 1998 – 2009, but recorded here for the first time. I wrote many others through those years, but the songs I chose for Caja De Huesos are some of the […]
Caja De Huesos (2023) Read More »
Ramshackle Alchemy is another collection of music from my past, within my current process of reviewing my life, bidding fond farewell to prior selves, making room for a new me. It is also one of those projects that’s been rearing to go for a goodly while…in fact, Ramshackle Alchemy has been patiently ready almost 15
Ramshackle Alchemy: Serf Instrumentals 2004-09 (2023) Read More »
The Burn That Ukulele! series is one of several projects that have been idling at the edges for over a decade. I haven’t tended to these projects because they all involve retrospective recordings, and my focus has been on creating (ie inundated by) new material. This year however has opened a very different process, one
Burn That Ukulele! Vol 2 & 3: Uke Transmissions 2011 – 13 Read More »
(NB: I use the term ‘teacher’ here as a convenient reference, but it might be more accurate to say I was a ‘facilitator of creative learning experiences’. Either way, my central motivation and passion was to share skills, ideas and inspiration with others, through creative play, curiosity and discovery.) From 1990 to 2017 my main
An Overview of My Teaching Life Read More »
Burn That Ukulele! Vol 1 is the first part of a retrospective project that’s been lurking at the fringes for quite awhile. It contains 22 tracks, and at 1 hour 20 mins I guess it constitutes a ‘double album’. My decision to release it now is due to a much larger life process, of revisiting
Burn That Ukulele! Vol 1: Uke Transmissions 2011-13 Read More »
The recordings on Textured Monotonies V have actually been ready for release since Dec 2022, but the many-tentacled beast that is life added multiple layers of entanglement that caused the album to wait in the wings for a bit. Musicking is how I respond to and integrate the process of living, and sometimes the more
Textured Monotonies V (2023) Read More »
The pieces on Burial Grounds emerged as part of the same process that produced Making Peace I & II and Looking For Light, and conceptually they carry elements of the same themes. This album explores how a place (land / house) can accumulate layers of historical trauma, and how the energies of that trauma can
Burial Grounds (2023) Read More »
Looking For Light contains many layers of meaning for me, all relating to my experience of living in a particular place over the months between July 2022 and March 2023. The album emerged at the same time as three others (Making Peace I & II, and Burial Grounds), and all are meditations on the same
Looking For Light (2023) Read More »
My musicking process / continuum is unavoidably autobiographical, always reflecting some aspect of whatever life events my ‘self’ is experiencing at the time. I think of my albums more as creative journals and sketchbooks, drawing and writing in sound. The act is immediate, grabbing snatches of life as it swirls, rumbles, whizzes, grinds and shudders
Making Peace I & II (2023) Read More »
As my musicking meanders across, between, and in spite of, so many styles, and my album catalogue is something of a wild garden, I thought it might be less daunting for some folks if I grouped my recordings into a few categories for easier exploration. I’ll update new releases to the list whenever I remember
A Musical Map: Easy User’s Guide? Read More »
There’s more than a few threads to the creation of this series, but I’d like to start with the coagulent, the binding agent, as it were. A while ago I met a highly intelligent young autistic man with a gift for written language and astute observation. He was also acutely sensitive and found social interaction
Textured Monotonies series I – IV (2023) Read More »
In today’s culture (gasping as it is for nuanced vocabulary and thought), the word ‘intimacy’ seems mainly to appear in conversations about (human) relationships, as polite popular code for sex. For those inclined to living with more nuance, there is a multifluence of ‘intimacies’. These include states of connection that can be metaphysical, extra-sensory and
This third sampler in the Rock Samples series has been sitting around for awhile, adjusting its geological shape over time, allowing its various strata to settle. Rock Samples Vol 3 is curated from earlier albums as well as newer albums released after Vol 2 (2019). The pieces on Vol 3 form a geological slice that
Rock Samples Vol 3: More sculpted grit & gravel Read More »
Because, Remember is in part a meditation on memory: its fragmentary nature to begin with, and its unavoidable fragmentation over time. In particular, it explores the memory of a time that my children can’t even remember having with me. As an aging parent, I feel a strong undercurrent of sadness and loss in knowing that
Because, Remember (2022) Read More »
I’m putting these two albums together here as both of them surfaced at roughly the same time, overlapping in their creation in the space of a month or two. Both are continuing a kind of jazz exploration that began on the previous Displacement Ritual album; Angles Of Entry perhaps has a more abstract and agitated
Angles of Entry / Hillbilly Spacejazz (2022) Read More »
A restless ceremonial jazz journey, exploring physical, emotional & psychic displacement. Moods shift in fluid ripples or jagged left-turns, dreamlike, coiling and slithering through moments of harmonic repose, fragmentary riffing and freeform dissonance. Initially recorded over a couple of days, in the thick of a very difficult & distressing house-move, and developed around one meandering
Displacement Ritual (2022) Read More »
In 2013 I began to synthesise a range of teaching techniques I’d been testing & refining over many years, into a process I called thINK Draw Connect Learn, or thINK for short. You can read more about thINK here. The thINK Process includes deconstructing drawing into abstract ‘Elements‘ and modelling how these simple building blocks
SCHOOL OF CARTOON ARTISTRY: Cartoon Workshops Designed To Make You THINK! Read More »
A DIFFERENT WAY TO thINK ABOUT DRAWING thINK is an educational drawing process and a set of creative learning tools I developed as a metacognitive teaching model for my students. It evolved over a lifetime of deep observation of my own drawing processes, and decades of teaching creative thinking via the art of cartoon drawing.
thINK Draw Connect Learn Read More »
Plenty of cartoonists have offered ‘how-to-draw’ workshops on ways to capture emotion in cartoon faces. Often the ‘workshop’ is more of a demonstration or performance – the style is quick and sketchy, a quick fix aimed at entertainment rather than learning, and usually intended to promote the cartoonist’s latest book or other product. Of course,
Creative Communication: Cartooning for Emotional Literacy Read More »
Although chronologically some of these recordings were made prior, Kalonga follows on from Floater, and the pieces all emerged from the same event, ie having to leave our home of the last 5 years. Kalonga is the name of the dirt road leading to where the house is situated – I’ve always liked the visual
Over the months of June / July we had to move from our home of the last 5 years (Kalonga). Noise restrictions at our new home won’t allow me to freely record live sounds, so I spent the final weeks alone in the empty Kalonga, saying goodbye and hastily recording various live sounds that I
These two albums, at least in name & presentation, are very loosely continuing the ‘Music For….‘ series begun in 2019, but not really adhering to the parameters I set for myself back then (eg . 20 – 30 min long, continuous edits that organically evolved into new shapes as each new musical idea emerged, but
Music For Deep Relapsation / Music For Mindless Unwhereness (2022) Read More »
Some of my albums have no particular story, no underlying thematic glue or particular point of inspiration when I’m creating them. I might impose an identity on these albums after the fact, but they really just exist as exercises in sound and composition for their own sake. Crucible is one such. There are, however, two
Between June 2020 – Feb 2021, I participated in over a dozen online surveys relating to adult autistic experience (more info here). Most were research projects focused on the very things I was living at the time – mental health & suicidality, autistic burnout, financial not-so-well-being, among others – and the surveys provided me a
Between June 2020 – Feb 2021, I participated in over a dozen online surveys relating to adult autistic experience (more info here). Most were research projects focused on the very things I was experiencing at the time – mental health & suicidality, autistic burnout, financial not-so-well-being, among others – and the surveys provided me a
Surveying The Terrain III: ARCAP Research Priorities of Autistic People Read More »
The first pieces for Xenografika began taking shape immediately after I completed the Kro Gnosis album, which had itself followed immediately after Temple, and all three albums emerged consecutively in the space of just six weeks, so it’s not surprising they form a thematic continuum. I’m tending to think of them as a trilogy of
Xenografika (2022) Read More »
In my ‘Glossary Of Terms I Won’t Be Using’, I include ‘identifies as’ as a popular term I avoid in relation to my own autism; I also mention having a few ‘personal harumphs’ about the term, so I’ll attempt to explain my thinking a bit in this article. The notion of ‘identity’ itself is infinitely
Identity Beyond Autism Read More »
Once again, a combination of disparate ingredients organically converged to bring about this new collection of musical explorations, Kro Gnosis. I began these recordings immediately after completing the Temple album, which marked a return to actual recording (ie using a microphone & playing real instruments again, rather than collaging existing recorded materials, or generating sounds
The emergence of the Temple recordings began with an unexpected musical gift from my partner Heidi: a beautiful 17-note kalimba (thumb piano). I had mentioned to her quite awhile back that I’d like a kalimba to experiment with, so I was especially delighted when she surprised me with it. I didn’t engage with playing it
This is a question I’ve been interrogating since my self-assessment at 53 as apparently having an Aspergers-flavoured autistic neurology. I say ‘apparently’, not because I doubt it, but because it is still only one description of my experience, among many – or to paraphrase Dr. Stephen Shore: when you’ve met one description of reality, you’ve
Is My ‘Otherness’ Autistic? Read More »
After the fun I had frankensteining Asp Burger ReMangled (in which I ‘remangled’ tracks from my 2018 Asp Burger album), I felt inspired to continue this approach of musical cut-up / collage on the album that grew directly out of Asp Burger – namely, Gringo! As I’m still in the gradual process of rehabilitating a
For A Few Gringos More (2022) Read More »
Earlier this year I recorded a collection of spacious, minimalist piano pieces that became the album The Witnessing Of Paint In Its Drying Moments. I was using these pieces to help me process a surge of deep grief and loss at the time. I have no theoretical understanding of classical music composition (nor am I
Elegiac Reaction (2021) Read More »
Things to do when you have a broken wrist: Make a guitar album. That is, take an existing guitar album, slash it up, mangle it & feed it through the editing mincer until one arrives at a completely different guitar album. The result is a completely new set of tunes, part growly, lo-fi artypunk, part
Asp Burger ReMangled (2021) Read More »
While these two albums certainly both share qualities of atmospherics, spacious soundscaping and ambient textures, they are both stylistically distinct from each other. Part of why I’ve included them together in this post is that they also share the somewhat dubious quality of being ‘rehashed’, even if in different senses. I’ve written elsewhere about cannibalising
Other spaces: Postnebulism / Uncertainty Box (2021) Read More »
More soundtracks to limbo, stasis & suspension – in this case, the grinding halt of a broken wrist, the physical restrictions of doing things onehanded or not at all, the slow process of allowing the body to heal. Coming to terms with not being able to play guitar, maybe for months, maybe not ever. A
Other spaces: One Hand Three Ears (2021) Read More »
It took me many years to get used to drawing on any kind of large scale, especially anything larger than A2 size. Several different experiences helped free me up in this area; in particular, when I began running cartoon workshops in schools, drawing on large blackboards (remember them?) and whiteboards in front of a class.
Murals & public art Read More »
