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 »
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
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 »
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
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
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 »
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 »
