I'm a composer, producer, writer and academic. I'm Australian, and I live and work in London.
I make eclectic, mostly instrumental music that usually explores a specific limitation: a single piano in Feather Hammer, spam emails as lyrics in Machines, the distance between score and interpretation in Three Preludes, purely analogue instruments and technologies in Rococochet, the reuse and reversal of my own earlier material in Bird Rib, two machines I do not know how to use in Deliberate Unfamiliarity.
My music training started with classical piano (studying with Dorothy McCormack) before moving to contemporary composition and studio production during my studies at University of Queensland (under Philip Bracanin and Robert Davidson). I release records with Bigo & Twigetti. I also make sound design and music for Elizabeth Price's moving-image works, most recently for the Liverpool Biennial and Manifesta 16. My music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 6 Music (in the UK), Triple J and Double J (in Australia), and NPR (in the USA), and performed by ensembles including the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Ruthless Jabiru and Curve Ensemble.
I wrote Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2022) and a 33 1/3 volume on Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love (2024). I'm editing the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of David Bowie, I write regularly for The Wire magazine, and I'm an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies (Field Notes).
I'm an Associate Professor in Music at Kingston School of Art, where I lead the MA Music and MA Music Production courses. I supervise doctoral research across a range of subjects linked to popular music production, consumption or analysis: analogue recording practices, extended vocal technique, accessible music technologies, heavy metal and British youth, and the impact of AI/voice cloning technologies on pop music expression, authenticity and identity.
In 2016, with Isabella van Elferen and producer Tony Visconti, I co-founded the Visconti Studio, a teaching, research and knowledge exchange facility built around analogue and hybrid recording, and I've directed it since 2022. In 2019 I founded the Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra, sponsored by Dubreq, which brings together staff, students, alumni and local residents and has released two albums.
Across the music, writing and research, my work circles a set of shared questions. What can sounds mean beyond their musical content? How does the studio shape the work that passes through it? What happens when material filters through human bodies, histories and technologies? How do recordings hold memory? Who gets to compose, and with what?
Journalists and programme editors: a press kit with biographies at three lengths and downloadable photographs.