Composer from March, Cambs. UK, born 1974.
My approach to music is influenced by sociobiology. I regard the process of creation as a heuristic "generate and test" process (see Daniel Dennett: "Brainstorms"), with permanence added through record-keeping. Once documents exist these are then amended and fortified in line with our cultural biases and the sense of authorship is a "user-illusion" (see Susan Blackmore: "The Meme Machine"). Overall I believe that the generative power of chance, restrained by the limits of the environment in which it operates, is considerable, and that my role is to enhance the memetic fitness of these outcomes by taking up the calls they make along obvious aesthetic lines.
Everything I write is available free online via The Internet Archive but there's a lot of it so this central information website is useful for sifting through and making sense of it all. There you will find documentation, scanned scores, a few electronic scores, and a lot of finished pieces in mp3 format for free download.
To download or view paper scores (primarily from the 90s before I realised that self-sufficiency was the only real value worth pursuing) click here
To download or view the written word in the form of articles, rants, essays, reviews and suchlike, click here but please bear in mind that this is an area of growth so there's not so much there yet. There should be a few rants and things appearing shortly.
Click on the CD covers below to view details and/or to order hard copies of specific CDs.
Hard copies of the CDs cost £5 (GBP / Sterling) including post and packaging to anywhere in the world but they are free to download in high quality formats.
When you click the CD cover, a page will open with the tracklisting, a larger version of the cover art, plus a link to the album's page on The Internet Archive so that you can download it in MP3 format.
2007 CD Albums
2006 CD Albums
The full end-of-year report summarising 2006's output is here in rich text format.
"The Trinity", November 2006
"The Trinity" is a three-CD work written for the 'private theatre' of individual listeners. It is written entirely in the spirit of the Brights movement and is specifically unconnected with the Christian notion of the Holy Trinity. It does however borrow the central metaphor of three big important things which are also the same thing. Its central concern is the relationship between our aesthetic endowment (evolutionary aesthetics) and the circumventing of direct memetic forces by the use of determinacy/indeterminacy to initiate the creation process.
Full documentation for the project is here in rich text format.
July-August 2006 "Carmen of the Spheres"
"Carmen of the Spheres" might be the world's first rational approach to writing a "Harmony of the Spheres" and it may also be the world's longest CD-single, at just over two hours. Intended to be played on a digital pyramid which stands on a digital music scanning desk, the piece is literally downloaded from the stars! For details about the method, see the individual pages, and sorry for the terrible Uranus gag.
UPDATE: To make it easier to do aural modelling of long orbital periods, I've made an MS-Access 2000/XP database which automates the process and provides a place to store all the data. To find out more about it and download it to use with your own data, click here. See also the article Octave-Equivalence Modelling, describing aural modelling of periodic objects based on the aesthetic relatedness of octaves.
2006 "Malhaus" Series
"Malhaus" is a short story I wrote at the start of 2006. The music project associated with it is a first step, or a first more significant step anyway, into "Open Source Audio", where, like free software, not only is the finished product published but also the 'source code' which led to its construction. This can then be edited and compiled into custom derivations. The "Malhaus Construction Kit" is the culmination of this, and two "Examples" support this. In addition, there's a purely "Instrumental Version" which fits nicely into other collections of music if you're making a custom compilation (open source principles apply to physical CDs as well as musical objects), and of course there's the conventional "Audio-book Version" which tells the story in a logical, clear way. The aim though is for the piece to be a matter of one-to-one communication, with the end-user compiling their own unique version of the piece. It's a bit like those 60s "choice" pieces but instead of the choice extending to the performer, it extends to the listener, not in a "multimedia interactive" kind of way (ie. picking the order of tracks, etc. LOL) but on a deeper level of actually defining the music from its raw materials.
The key factor for this type of musical approach is the development of layerable elements which sort of "know" that they're not going to be heard alone. Instead of belting out Verdi in other words, they practise their Thomas Tallis instead.
2006 "Pompa Funebris"
A solemn, chance-based set of funeral musicks aimed at the austere end of the market.
2004-5 CD Albums
"Confessions of a Teenage Sociopath" Series, 1989-1991
This is a collection of remastered cassette tapes, dating from very early in my music-making life. Starting at age 14, these run through to age 17 and whilst they're not 'mature' or even 'presentable' as music, they're interesting in certain respects - there's performances which very freely interpret pieces by Beethoven, etc. including lots of note-changing and even (in volume two) some really bizarre arrangements for synths etc. but not at all to "rock'n'roll" them up, because at the time I was vehemently opposed (or so I thought!) to ALL popular music. Very strange times - weird kid basically. Anyhow I'm sharing these on the understanding that you know I'm not saying they're "good" in the usual sense.
1990s Ensemble Pieces, Piano Pieces, Tape Pieces, later sketches and electronic studies
These are partly remastered tapes from the 1990s and also piano music and ensemble compositions from my Uni days. Much of it's quite abrasive but some's quite similar to what I'm doing now. Scores of the big ensemble pieces will steadily be scanned in and published. The MP3s are free but please, for the ensemble music in particular, don't sell it. Professional career musicians gave their time on a one-off basis to make those recordings so it wouldn't be fair to profit from it. Feel free to sell my recent stuff of course.
CD-ROM
My music hosted on external sites
Everything I write is published via The Internet Archive but it makes sense to have fingers in pies for greater networking potential (to encourage collaboration, for one thing) so below are links to sites which offer free music downloads, on which I've posted music.
Download.com - 50MB of stuff online here
Soundclick.com - quite a lot of stuff wil steadily be added here - around 50MB online presently - the Soundclick community is very large and has an extremely impressive collection of free music. You don't have to be a member to listen to streamed music but you do have to sign up (for free) to download MP3 files.
I've also published some of my (music-related and non-music-related) ZX Spectrum software from the 1990s, much of which is available in expanded format (including BASIC and machine-code listings, screenshots, samples of music etc.) via The Internet Archive. It is also available for download in emulator-friendly formats via 'World of Spectrum' here.
Paper Scores and 'Sibelius' Scores
Click here for the 'scores' page.
There are a few examples of scanned pages of finished paper scores, which can be requested in hard copy, though I must say it's unlikely to be cheap (it'll be at cost though). Full versions of scanned paper scores will also be added to a collection on The Internet Archive as they are completed. I plan to scan all the scores of the major ensemble pieces from the 90s as well as juvenilia from the late 80s, some of which is quite curious.
The page will be expanded as paper scores are typed up and ported to 'Sibelius' - nb. the 'Scorch' plug-in for viewing Sibelius files is free to use. I will also publish the scores as General MIDI files so that you can load them into other score-viewers and sequencers, etc.
The advantage of the electronic versions is that you can simply download them for first-class printing, or you can view them online. A small number of 'Sibelius' scores are available already.
Links, Articles and other Information
This section will expand as essays, etc. are written. For now there's a gushy page and the necessary page of external links and stuff will start appearing here steadily throughout 2007.
Aural Modelling - an article describing aural modelling of periodic objects based on the aesthetic relatedness of octaves.
Evolutionary Aesthetics - a brief sketch initially regarding the influence of the selfish replicators on our musical perceptions and tastes. Music appears to be the most memetic of all human endeavours so I'll start off emphasising the impact of genes before developing the memetic theory of modernist music.
Dreaming Shit - a short story from 2003
Malhaus - a short story from 2006
Influences and gushes : a brief series of paragraphs about the people I admire - this may expand to essays but for now it's just a quick overview of interesting people and the ways in which they impress me.