Biography

Profile, Background, & Vision

I am a Melbourne based composer and sound-artist working through fully notated works for traditional acoustic instruments and electroacoustic projects. Occasionally I have blended the two streams and continue to explore the possibilities of overlap.

While I consider myself self-taught, I have found engagements with some of Australia’s foremost composers to be instrumental in assisting me to develop my compositional voice and expand my creative practice. These include Chris Dench, Liza Lim, and Pedro Alvarez. My music has been performed in pubs, galleries, sculptures, and traditional venues across the country and I have had the privilege of collaborating with eminent performing artist contemporaries.

I have worked in a DIY fashion largely outside conventional pathways to produce my own music. I have had an ongoing and close collaboration with Nathaniel Currie as an audio engineer and producer in multiple successfully executed studio-recording projects.

Recently, while continuing to view my compositional practice as an inherently ‘exegetical’ process in which arcane or oblique ideas are unfolded throughout the course of a piece, I have been interested in pursuing proceedures that are best described as ‘archeological’ and ‘experimental’. Processes that I regard as the former involve the spontaneous generation of material and then ongoing a sifting or fining, both with and without the writing of music; the latter would be to take a data set of any kind allied with my vision for a given piece and subjecting to proceedures that test (and whither) it or explode (and expand) it, and place selections side-by-side or simultaneously into the piece. The result of these proceedures is that I will better extend the piece both ‘backwards’/’deeper’ into its own materiality, or propell it ‘forwards’ into by extending the limits of if its own possibility.

Selected Recent Highlights (2022-23)

• New Work: infold for solo flute

Commissioned by Ensemble MANIA

The development of this work was generously funded by a City of Melbourne Quick Response Arts Grant

Performer: Damien MacDonald

Venue and Concert: Line Tracing 3 at the Salamanca Arts Centre, 25/02/2023

(performed alongside MONA FOMA 2023)

• New Work: outlined against afterglow for violin and stereo electroacoustic tape

Commissioned by the Music Box Project for Jane Aubourg

Performer: Jane Aubourg

Venue and Concert: stir, flutter at the Glebe Hotel, 18/06/2022

(performed alongside sun study ii)

The Past

While I consider myself self-taught, I have found several engagements with some of Australia’s foremost composers to be instrumental in assisting me to develop my compositional voice and expand my creative practice. These include Chris Dench, Liza Lim, and Pedro Alvarez. Closer to my age, I have found close relationships with not only performers, but with practitioners such as Jakob Bragg, Liam Flenady, Jaslyn Robertson, and Elizabeth Jigalin to be especially enriching to my practice. Further afield, I find the experimental and challenging attitude of the legacy of modernism to be a source of inspiration and composers such as Richard Barrett, Iannis Xenakis, Isabel Mundry, and Betsy Jolas are of particularly importance to me and my practice.

I was born in Collingwood, Melbourne 1990 and, growing up largely outside Australia and not finding myself anywhere stable both at school (finishing 2008) and university (finishing 2013), moved down to Hobart, Tasmania (2016-17) where I began to seriously pursue composition. After returning to Melbourne in late-2017 and finding the prospect of further study unappealing, I applied for and was resident at Neon Parlour studios from early 2018 until early 2021. While here, I set about tackling the various problems of materiality thrown-up by questions of late Modernity and the lack of tools available to realise the music I wanted to bring into being.

It was about this time I received several formative commissions from the musicians around me in Melbourne. Notably I worked closely with Sophie Marcheff on fluttuare sospeso which was premiered at the Abbotsford Convent alongside Australian Classics by Helen Gifford and seminal international works by Henze and Saariaho. I developed several projects with Lily Tait, culminating in sun study ii which premiered right before lockdown in Melbourne at the orgiastic weekend of creative works called Supernaculum at the closing Fitzroy Arts Hotel. When I began exploring electroacoustic and electronic music in late-2019 I realised I could not only explore music and sound in a different dimensionality, but reach out to new audiences through the diffusion of works in a gallery/sound-art context, and across soundcloud where I have engaged internationally with the noise-art and sonic-distortion communities of practice.

From 2018 to the present, despite lacking the institutional access to ensembles and opportunities as many of my colleagues, I have made my own connections and forged ahead with an outsider’s perspective to anchor my practice within the Australian contemporary Art Music and Sound-Art scene and to extend the experimental legacy of Modernism with the musicians immediately around me in projects audiences to date have found challenging and engaging. I have sought out musicians myself and realised projects, both with performers and by myself. I believe the next stage in my creative practice is to expand into larger scale works, especially those for more than one musician, and workshop these closely with the performers. I look forward to doing this, especially assisted by a grant to sustain my creative practice, in estuarial and further into the future in Turbulence I and potential “collaborative” works I have been in discussion to prepare.

The Present & Future Plans           

The lockdowns which have dominated life in Melbourne have been both slowing and detrimental to my creative practice, but the last two years have also seen me realise a number of projects and recordings outside of institutions and the “pause” in daily life has been beneficial to these adventures. Though the premiere of sun study ii was a success, the exigencies of the context did not leave me with a satisfactory recording despite the brilliant documentation of the event. In November 2021 Lily Tait and I, with Nathaniel Currie as Recording Engineer got together at Neon Parlour Studios to rehearse, sound-check, and run a recording to a professional standard. Buoyed by this experience, and having a close relationship with Nathaniel, we got together again with Edward Wang to record “le bois pourrit en craquant” at Neon Parlour in early 2021 and were pleased to deliver a recording of this work, to a professional standard, online on my souncloud where it, together with the studio recording of sun study ii and the concert recording of fluttuare sospeso (as edited and mixed by Andrew Barnard) have reached a wider audience than I originally anticipated, both within and without Australia.

Nathaniel Currie and I have planned two major recording projects of my works in 2022: recording my large scale work for ‘cello and tape crown shyness, and travelling up to Sydney to make recordings of my guitar music to date with Dennis van Rooyen. We also plan to record estuarial. Working with Nathaniel has meant I can deliver professional quality recordings of my works even when they have not been premiered, which over the last two years of lockdowns and cancelled performances has been a real pleasure and of great importance to allowing my practice to reach wider audiences.

Recently, I have been contacted by performers such as Niamh Dell and Oscar Ridout in the UK after hearing works of mine on my soundcloud and finding the scores of such pieces on my website. I have an open dialogue with them about the performance of existing works and in commissioning new works in late-2022.

Outside of recording existing or recently finished works, the lockdowns of the last two years have impeded my delivery of works for live performance, as well as repeat performances of existing works at a moment crucial to my “emergence” as a young composer and sound artist. I am hoping, especially with the assistance of a grant in Sustaining my creative practice, that with several new works currently in development to be presented together with finished projects awaiting live-premiere in 2022 I will continue to make my mark on the Australian composition scene.