Your work spans concert music, sound design, electronics, film and installation. What connects these different areas in your artistic practice?

I think it is very easy to get hung up on different genre and the different contexts we work in but to me it is all just about sound floating in time. Each of the contexts can have different baggage attached to it and different needs. Writing a stand alone piece of music is different from working on a film score, and different again from an installation. A stand alone piece of music needs to have its own internal logic that holds the piece together and keeps the listener engaged but ultimately it is my choice as the composer what that flow is, what feels right to me, and how the work should unfold. 

 

In film it is almost the opposite. With a stand alone piece you as the composer are the sole author. In film you are working to support someone else’s vision. There is still collaboration with the director about what that vision is but ultimately your music is there to support them. 

 

Installation sits somewhere between the two I think especially when collaborating with a visual artist. I try and frame the sonic space knowing that someone might only pass through for a few minutes or might sit there for a few hours. The work has to allow for both of these experiences. 

 

What connects all of it is the fact that music is simply sound moving through time. It is ephemeral, abstract, and constantly disappearing as it happens. No matter what medium I am writing in, I am always dealing with that same basic material.

 

Much of your work seems to invite listeners into immersive and reflective listening experiences. What interests you about creating these kinds of spaces?

I think it comes from the way I enjoy listening. I like music that makes me feel as if I am falling into it, as if it is surrounding me, and everywhere I turn there is something new or slightly different to hear.

 

I also think a composer has to write for themselves first. Thinking about the audience is an important part of the marketing process, but for me that comes later after the writing. While I am making the work, I need to trust what feels right musically rather than second-guessing how someone else might receive it. 

 

The kind of immersion I am interested in can happen in very different ways. It might be a concert with a massive sound system, where the experience is physical and visceral. Or it might be sitting quietly with headphones, listening closely to a recording. Either way, I want to feel completely absorbed by the piece, with enough space and time to sit inside it and meditate on it.

 

It has taken me a while to have the confidence to do less in my music. Earlier on in my career, I would often worry that something had gone on too long and needed to change. But I’ve realised that one of the problems with composing is you are looking at the piece through a microscope, and you can lose your sense of its real scale. With experience, you begin to understand how long an idea needs, how slowly something can unfold, and when the most powerful thing is not to move on too quickly. 

 

Through "The Night With..." you have explored new ways of presenting contemporary classical music. What motivated you to rethink traditional concert formats?

Simply because that is how I want to go to a concert and experience music. I use myself as the test subject for almost everything I do. If I wouldn’t be interested in it as a listener or audience member, or wouldn’t want my music placed in a specific environment then I probably should not be doing it. 

 

As much as I love going to opera, ballet, and orchestral concerts, I have never felt comfortable in the seats. I’m about 190cm so often my knees end up in the back of the seat in front. I know there are plenty of people taller than me! This physical discomfort takes me out of the listening experience. I don’t have the same problem in a gig in a club where I can stand, move, or just generally choose how I want to inhabit the space. 

 

That led me to experiment with using a more gig like setup for concerts and people really engage with it. There are seats for people who want to sit down but also space for people to stand if they want. The concerts are usually in three, 15-30min sections to mimic a little the non-classical gig experience of being able to walk to the bar whenever you want or chat to a friend between sets without interrupting the music. 

 

Classical music, especially when it is unamplified, asks for a particular kind of attention. I do not want to undermine that. I want to create a frame where people can give the music that attention in a way that works for their bodies, their concentration, and their expectations of what a concert can be.

 

Contemporary music is sometimes perceived as challenging or inaccessible. How do you approach the relationship between experimentation and audience engagement?

This comes back to my core kind of selfish philosophy. Music is just sounds floating in time, and I am my own test audience. 

 

I think that a lot of the perceived difficultly of contemporary music is a learned bias. Some new musical languages in the 20th centurary felt deliberately difficult, or at least very far away from what many listeners expected. But I do not think that means contemporary music is inherently inaccessible. I just tell people that you might like some of the sounds, you might not like some of them but that is fine. You do not have to like everything. 

 

I also only programme music that I want to listen to (or think I will likely want to listen to in the case of a new commission). I am unashamed about that. I take the view that I am not as unique as I’d like to think I am so if I believe in something there are likely a few people out there that will too. 

 

All of my marketing for "The Night With…" simply says ’this will be a cool gig with cool music. Come!’. Not trying to be remotely apologetic about the fact that all of the music is written in the last 50 years as many of the established organisations seem to do. I do not want to frame that as a problem to be overcome. 

 

I’ve found that if you believe properly in something, people will at very least be intrigued to find out why this is a good thing and then stick around. And that is exactly what happens based on the feedback and the returning audience numbers. People feel like they can take a risk because the concerts are affordable and presented in a relaxed way, they realise they enjoy it and then keep coming back! 

 

Collaboration plays an important role in your work, whether with filmmakers, visual artists or performers. What do these collaborations bring to your creative process?

A good collaboration should create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, that couldn’t exist or appear from the brains of any one person involved. I have always felt has been the case in all of the collaborations I’ve had. A musician who shows me something they can do on their instrument I hadn’t seen before which opens a new direction for the work. A visual artist might bring a different way of approaching space, image, material, or atmosphere, and through the conversation we arrive at something neither of us would have made alone. A filmmaker might need a very particular emotional or sonic world, and that can push my music in a direction I would not otherwise have found.

 

Those encounters are valuable because they disturb your habits in a good way. They make you listen differently, think differently, and question the assumptions you bring into a project. Each collaboration teaches me something, and I hope I give something back to the people I work with as well. Art is all about sharing! 

 

Your music has often been described as having a meditative or contemplative quality. What role do silence, space and attention play in your compositions?

I think I’ve covered this in the immersive one. Let me know if not! :) 

 

We live in a time of constant stimulation and distraction. What role can music play in helping people reconnect with themselves and their surroundings?

This is possibly where the meditative impulse in my music comes from. I want to be fully absorbed by a work, whether it is something I have made or something I am listening to. I want the piece to give me a space where external thoughts and distractions can fall away for a while.

 

I think a concert can be a very good space for that. It is a focused time where you have chosen to be there and to experience something. That does not mean everyone has to engage in the same way. I am definitely not against people using their phone at a concert to take a photo, or to read a programme note, because people experience things differently. Those different ways of engaging do not mean that someone is not listening properly. They may simply be finding the way into the work that feels most comfortable to them.

 

That connects to the way I present concerts as well. Giving people the option to sit, stand, move, or choose how they inhabit the room is part of recognising that not everyone experiences a performance in the same way. In recent years, I think there has been a much greater understanding of the plurality of people’s lived experiences, bodies, attention spans, and ways of being in the world. That should affect how we think about performance spaces.

 

For me, though, there is still something very powerful about going to a performance and becoming totally engaged with it. It does not happen every time, but I love it when it does. We all have times where we question what we are doing and why we have chosen this path in life but there are concerts that stick in my mind that reminded me ’that! That is why I am doing this!’.  I hope the concerts I put on, and the work I write, can give other people that same feeling. 

 

As both a composer and producer, you shape not only musical works but also the contexts in which they are experienced. How do these two roles influence each other?

I think the two roles feed into each other, both positively and negatively.

 

As a composer, producing has made me much more aware of the context around a piece. Such as where it might be performed, how it might be rehearsed, how it might tour, what kind of space it needs, what kind of experience the audience might have. That can be creatively useful, because I can think about the whole situation the work will exist within. 

 

For example, a recent work, Prelude and Gathering, starts about five minutes before the “official” concert start time and uses the tuning gestures and requirements of viols to play with the audience’s sense of when a concert has actually begun. The players come on one by one, sit down, and appear to start tuning, but they are actually following the instructions of the piece. Slowly the audience begins to realise that the performance has already started. It was really fun watching that moment of realisation, but I am also pretty sure I would not have thought of that as a concept for a piece if I had not produced so many concerts.

 

At the same time, it means I know the practical consequences of my compositional choices. If I decide to include a large amount of percussion, for example, I know exactly how difficult the logistics of that might be. That knowledge can be helpful because it makes me think carefully about whether something is really necessary. But it can also be dangerous, because you do not want practicality to start limiting the imagination too early.

 

So there is a tension between the two roles. The producer in me understands budgets, venues, logistics, rehearsal time, and audience experience and how to shape that. The composer in me wants to follow the sound wherever it needs to go. The useful thing is that each side keeps the other honest. The composer stops the producer from becoming too pragmatic, and the producer stops the composer from pretending that work exists outside of real world consequences.

 

I have not quite decided whether knowing so intimately the impact of my choices as a composer on the person putting the work on is a good or bad thing. It is probably both.

 

 

Looking at the contemporary music landscape today, what developments excite you most at the moment?

I am enjoying the cross genre conversations that are going on. The fact that creators aren’t sticking to just being a contemporary composer, they are experimenting with other genre or drawing those other genre into their concert works. Anna Meredith is a great example of this, a lot of the work released by New Amsterdam Records fluidly goes across those genre boundaries, and then you have pop music like Rosalía’s Lux, or Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights album that uses the language of classical and contemporary classical music. 

 

I think it is a really interesting time for music because we now have such easy access to almost every kind of music that has ever been created. That changes how people listen, but it also changes how people make work. Composers and musicians are not only influenced by the tradition they were trained in, but by everything they have absorbed from records, clubs, film, games, theatre, online culture, and whatever else happens to cross their ears.

 

Tied to that, there also seems to be a resurgence of a DIY attitude. I see younger composers and musicians deciding that they do not need permission from an established organisation to make something happen. They can just create the context themselves. Projects like Prxludes in London or Das Haus in Belgium are good examples of people putting on interesting work that engages seriously with these cross-genre conversations while also building their own platforms for it. This is a world I want to continue to work in where a composer can jump between writing for concerts, making records, working with electronics, thinking about staging, and build the structures around their work without needing those things to be separate identities.

 

What can audiences look forward to experiencing at this year’s festival?

The programme is almost finalised so can’t share everything just yet! But some things I can share at the moment are we will be having Riot Ensemble performing Yannis Kyriakides' Dreams of the Blind a really beautiful audiovisual work taking inspiration from blind people’s descriptions of their dreams. The visual elements are done in such a way that they create another rhythm that is silently felt on top of the ensemble. I’m writing a new piece for the same concert. Duo Goggles from Belgium will be playing Lets Be Real by Jonathan Bonny about the search for balance in life through the maze of social media and AI. We also have Airborne Extended from Vienna premiering a new work by Becca Simms, and Joanna Nicholson’s chamber opera exploring the life of 9th century Scottish figure Aud the Deep-Minded. 

 

More will be announced soon! 

 

And finally, a more personal question: What is currently inspiring you, musically, artistically or simply in everyday life?

At the moment I have a slightly calmer period after a rather crazy eighteen months, which is very refreshing.

I am spending more time reading again, and I am currently working my way through Asimov’s Foundation series. I have always loved sci-fi, and I enjoy the scale of it, the long histories, technological imagination, and people trying to understand their place within something much bigger than themselves.

I have also taken a few pottery classes, which has been a really nice creative outlet in a completely different way. There is something really satisfying about working with clay on a wheel and seeing the shape slowly appear, then then often collapse on itself again….! 

Mostly, though, I am enjoying being able to write music and work on mixes without the pressure of knowing I only have a few hours that day to do it. I can take my time a little more. There are still deadlines but they are not racing towards me quite as quickly as they have been.

And, as always, I am trying to go scuba diving as much as possible. Writing this, I realise there is a kind of meditative connection between all my interests and what I enjoy doing. I just never seem to manage to get into the habit of actually meditating.