Biography

I am a composer and sound artist. I write for the instruments of Early Music – viols, harpsichords, organs – extending their historical tunings into contemporary microtonal sonorities, and recasting them through electronics, film, and installation. My music tends to be spectral, slow-moving, and made for somewhere in particular. It seeks a form of listening in which the historical instrument ceases to be an object of the past and becomes a means of attending more fully to the present.

Recent pieces pursue this through hybrid electronic-acoustic, multimedia, and spatial formats. Earth of Shine and Dark Mottling (completing autumn 2026) is a concert piece, Dolby Atmos recording, and 360° film for three spectrally retuned bass viols. Made with viol player Liam Byrne, it draws the consort tradition into spatial, digitally mediated listening. O Suns—O Grass of Graves, composed for the saxophonist David Zucchi and premiering in November 2026, sets saxophone multiphonics against a shifting constellation of spectral centres, the laptop and acoustic instrument continually tuning and retuning one another. It is co-commissioned by the Vaughan Williams Foundation, Hinrichsen Foundation, and Marchus Trust.

Previous concert works include Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees (2021–23), for which I sampled and digitally reconstructed some of the world’s most significant historical organs. Commissioned by Zubin Kanga, it was premiered at the National Gallery in London, later played at Het Orgelpark, Amsterdam, and released on CD by Flung Recordings. For Tate Britain I made a live performance for historical instruments and synthesisers (2020). After Violence (2018) was a music theatre work for voice, lute, synthesisers, and drag queen, drawing on songs by John Dowland (1563–1626) and commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts, National Trust, and Dulwich Picture Gallery. I have arranged songs by Björk, Radiohead, and David Bowie for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, composed music for Rambert Dance and Wilderness Festival, and created a multi-speaker installation for Kensington Palace’s 2019 exhibition, Victoria: Woman & Crown.

The intersection of place, heritage, and nature is an ongoing preoccupation. A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time (2023) set custom water-powered historical instruments in Sheffield’s Rivelin Valley. An album, film, and geolocated app, it was shortlisted for an Ivor Novello Award for Best Sound Art and named one of New Scientist’s albums of the year. Quartet for a Landscape (2021), written for the Baroque ensemble Nordic Affect, was premiered and recorded in Reykjavík, and later played back at dawn through a single loudspeaker installed on Stanage Edge, in the Peak District. Accrete (2019) drew its material from a twelfth-century church site in the City of London, returning its sonorities to the building as a reel-to-reel tape installation for the London Festival of Architecture. Silvertown (2017), made with experimental choir Musarc and the poet Annie Freud, was performed in a disused East London factory.

Alongside my composing, I am Lecturer in Composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Since 2020 I’ve presented Future Classical on Resonance FM, producing more than a hundred in-depth conversations with composers including George Benjamin, John Luther Adams, and Annea Lockwood. I am writing a book based on the series, Ecosystems of Sound (due 2028). From 2027 I’ll be undertaking a substantial new body of work, We Become the Enfolders, responding to the ecology and histories of the Suffolk coast through landscape instruments, film, and live performance.

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