Artist Statement (2022)

I am a mixed-media composer and musician from Ireland. Whether composition or performance, my work revolves around language, the creation of sound spaces, and the communication of meaning.

This work can be divided into a number of interrelated strands. The first of these is my interest in language and text-based music. It was this interest that led me to the study of the Japanese traditional theatre form of Noh, a ‘total’ artform in which the music and story have a complex, and sometimes opaque relationship. In order to explore this relationship, I have spent two years in Japan, studying the theory and performance of Noh at Geidai (Tokyo University of the Arts), under the tutelage of Noh master Takeda Takashi of the Hosho performance school. This experience was transformative of my work, introducing me to new traditions and approaches to music and meaning, as well as embodied learning and physical performance. During this time, I wrote a number of pieces exploring various technical and theoretical aspects of Noh, published an article about my approach to working with text in the University of Birmingham’s Riffs Journal (‘Signs and Scenes: Electro-acoustic Composition and Meaning’), and recorded an album of piano/electronics improvisatory reflections, ‘The moon sets and birds cry / 月は落ち、鳥が鳴いて’. During my time in Tokyo I also created music for two online productions for Yokohama Theatre Group, Wuthering Heights and The Peony Lantern.

In my written compositions, I am particularly interested in exploring ideas of mediation, collaboration and communication. Most of my recently composed work involves open or graphic scoring - exploring the white spaces and dark ink of the page, and the translation of gesture and motion to sound. Recent works of this kind include the 2019 work ‘my little Force explodes’ (commissioned by Ergodos and performed by Michelle O’Rourke and Lina Andonovska), based on the ‘envelope poems’ of Emily Dickinson and comprised of graphic scores written on envelopes to be opened by the performers. ‘Crosstalk’, created for Crash Ensemble as part of their Reactions project in 2020, simulates the feeling of communicating and reconciling experiences across continents during the Covid-19 pandemic through the interplay of gestures.

Experiments with the experience of liveness is fundamental to my work, not least in my own performance practice. This is most notable in my electronic music performance, based on the random selection of field recordings and other instrumental recordings, often paired with generative visual accompaniment (featured in two album releases under the titles Rndr I and Rndr II). This process has frequently been at the heart of collaborative performances, including with regular collaborator violist Sebastian Adams in my Kontakt concert series, with saxophonist Nick Roth in performance in Seoul, violinist Ian Peaston and others, and was at the heart of a talk on concepts of ‘Liveness in Electronic Music’ at Nerd Nite Tokyo in January 2020. This practice has recently been expanded to include improvisation with piano and electronics, and a combination with utai (chant)-style vocals is in development. Work with field recordings with musical ‘intervention’ has recently formed a new element in my electronic work, mostly significantly through the release of City Shadows, an album of impressions of Tokyo during the Covid-19 emergency, on the Takuroku label.

What links these strands is my belief in music as a communicative tool. Through music we can create spaces for people to connect, whether with each other or with an idea. Sometimes this can be the simplest recreation of a physical space through field recordings, or the interpretation of a written text and language, or as abstract as attempting to make a thought audible. Music is an experience unique to each individual, and as a musician, it is my honour to be part of the facilitation of these experiences.