music

I have a list I occasionally return to, if I’m bereft of inspiration and casting around for something new to fiddle with, of unfinished musical projects from the past that require re-mixing, re-solutioning or just plain turning inside out. After the emotional interrogations of the albums Crux and The Witnessing Of Paint In Its Drying

The Witnessing Of Paint In Its Drying Moments is an album of five very slow, minimalist piano compositions, created during a period of particularly intense grief and loss. Grief takes many forms, can return in great waves over decades, and loss is not exclusively the province of death.  The grief of losing someone deeply-loved yet

Huon Pieces: Letters & Notes could be described as a piano album, although the piano is supported by cello and violin, which lends to it the feeling of a small ensemble or quartet. It could also be described as a kind of minimalist neoclassical compositional experiment. Really it was a simple creative exercise, with clearly

Blues For A Mapless God (2020) Blues For A Mapless God is mostly, I suppose, a sombre meal, a tableau in a darkened chamber, shadows peering around the hunched glow of a candelabra, strange fruits and dark meats arranged in muted colours, for guests who may never arrive, who perhaps never existed to begin with…

Walkabout (I – VII) is a series of seven semi-ambient electronic albums created during the Tasmanian covid lockdown in 2020. Each album is developed around realtime recordings of my body moving through space/time along various local bush and beach walks in SE Tasmania. Electronics have been added to suggest a meditative, dimensional journey. In the

These two albums were made about six months apart and are two of my least favourite efforts, but they’re honest documents of my musical evolutions at the time, and I learnt a lot in the making of them. Significantly, both albums form bookends to our months of covid lockdown here in Tasmania during 2020 –

Echo Location still stands firmly among the albums I feel are my most musically-accomplished, the most fully-realised in their rendering – despite this album remaining, in a sense, unfinished.  Although not released until January 2020, chronologically these recordings were completed during May-July 2019 – between editing And Then I Wasn’t… and commencing the Music For..

The more abstract meanderings I had begun to explore at the tail end of the Dub albums (Dub An Dubberer / Dubber An Dubbererer / i!) seemed to draw me deeper into unchartable waters, a descent into a kind of musical madness where shapes loomed momentarily out of the fog only to dissolve or disintegrate

Somewhere around July of 2019 I came across a really superlative musicmaking app called Oscilab, a multidimensional wave oscillator tool that is so creatively intuitive and fun to fiddle with that it did the rounds in our family for weeks after I installed it on our iPad. I don’t have a clue when it comes

May – August 2019 was an especially fertile period for my guitar experimentation. After releasing Cupcake in March that year, I was especially drawn to clean electric guitar tones and the more ambient possibilities that this opened up. I had especially been listening to Danish jazz guitarist Jakob Bro, ambient country quartet SUSS, Daniel Lanois’

As I often work on multiple recording projects in parallel, I invariably accumulate pieces that don’t fit the context of a particular album, or are demos I know I’ll never get around to developing further (often because I forget how I played them in the first place). Although And Then I Wasn’t… and As Is

Every once in awhile I reorganise some of my eclectic ouevre into a compilation album, as a way of giving certain pieces of music a sense of contrast or definition that they may not have had on their original release. Introversations I & II (contemplative works 2016 – 19) gather together previously released acoustic &

Although these two albums were created as very separate entities from each other, I’m placing them together here for a couple of reasons (one being my autistic tendency to perceive patterns and connections in these things….). Chronologically, they were released within a couple of months of each other, although a lot of Is Land: Edges

After taking brief dips into ambient waters on other albums, this is my first attempt at a focused collection that fully completes itself as an ambient cycle. I think of these pieces as “sound mobiles”, as a way of describing the happy accidents that occur when their seemingly unrelated elements gently collide, bounce slowly in

For a quick overview of my loosely-genred “rock” experiments between 2017 – 2019, try my two Rock Samples compilations.  They are both available as free downloads (or pay if you want to) from my Bandcamp site.  You’ll find the individual album links below.  For a more detailed insight into each of the original “rock” albums

Part 1: Tectonic Following The Ears Have Walls, I continued my renewed interest in playing electric guitar, and the new potentials I was discovering in recording, using the Reaper platform and experimenting with various FX. I am self-taught in everything I do, and I’m sure many who learn this way will agree: it’s a process

Between 2003 – 2016 I was pretty obsessed by acoustic music from all over the world, in particular the authentic voice of acoustic instruments.  I’d pushed my acoustic guitar playing into increasingly complex territory with the gypsified Spondooli Brothers duo, dabbled in a few other folk instruments like mandolin & balalaika, and when I began