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 »
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 »
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 »
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
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
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 »
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 »
Often, by way of amusing myself, I assemble my recording experiments around a particular play on words, and the oddly-connected thoughts I encounter while working on the music, as I roll the idea around in my mind. The tracks on Occupy Your Mind have been rallied together under just such a tenuous link, like the
Other spaces: Occupy Your Mind (2021) Read More »
In musicking, as in life, there is never any one particular process – each project seems to emerge with a life of its own, with its own rhythm and breath, with both a sense of self-determination and of the unknown. In being receptive to the music as an entity in its own right, with its
Other spaces: Oort (2021) Read More »
In June this year I was cleverly duped into allowing my bank account to be hacked and the little money I had in there taken. I’m usually more cautious, but these people were sophisticated and psychologically astute, using very compelling explanations in their call. They clearly had no moral parameters guiding who they stole from.
Other spaces: Red Tape Bardo I – IV (2021) Read More »
This collection, Down On The Farm, could never really make up its mind about anything. It just kind of floated in the middle of a paddock somewhere, chewing its cud, gazing at the occasional fluffy cloud in the blue sky overhead…..just hung there, suspended in time, without really knowing what, if anything, it wanted to
Other spaces: Down On The Farm (2021) Read More »
This has been one of those albums that I’ve sort of snubbed a bit since recording it, but on revisiting I can appreciate it better – both its sonic flow and its significant position in the evolution of my recording process. In 2016 I was reaching the end of a ten-year obsession with playing solo
Other spaces: rain river rain (2016) Read More »
