Updates

Late Bowie: Legacy, Mortality and the Archival Impulse, 5 to 6 November 2026

Booking is now open for a conference Dr Matt Melia and I have been putting together for many months. Late Bowie takes place at the Visconti Studio, Kingston University, on Thursday 5 and Friday 6 November 2026, and it's the studio's tenth anniversary year, which feels like the right moment to do it.

The subject is Bowie's final period: The Next Day, Lazarus, and ★, the work he made while thinking hard about legacy and transience, and what has happened to that work in the ten years since. It's also about the archive, and the archival impulse in Bowie's artistic expression. The David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse opened last year, and the conference also looks at what it holds and what it makes possible.

Over two days we have around twenty papers from scholars in the UK, Europe, the US, and Japan, alongside a set of guests who've had a direct hand in Bowie's work and legacy:

• Harriet Reed, project lead for the David Bowie Archive at V&A East Storehouse, giving the opening keynote, with an archive workshop later in the day led by Claire Watt, Bowie Fellow at the V&A
• Jonathan Barnbrook, the designer behind the artwork for Heathen, Reality, The Next Day, and Blackstar, giving the closing keynote
• Peter Carpenter, author of Bowieland, in conversation with film and television producer Kevin Loader
• a screening of Mark Jenkin's short film David Bowie Is Dead (2018)

Panels cover the archive, memorial culture and fandom, Bowie on film, lateness and celebrity, absence, and mortality. I'll be giving a paper on The Next Day and the sounding archive.

The conference is in person only. Tickets are £25 per day or £40 for both, and booking closes on 3 November.

Book your place

Full details and programme on the Kingston University events page

On the Saturday after the conference, 7 November, we're leading a free walking tour of Bowie's London, meeting at Leicester Square tube at 11am and heading through Soho to Heddon Street, with an optional trip south to the Brixton mural afterwards. It's open to conference attendees and a guest each. Places are limited.

Book the walking tour

There will also be a curated programme of video essays and creative work on the Visconti Studio YouTube channel, for people who can't get to Kingston. I'll post the call for contributions here shortly.

The Stars Look Very Different Today - Good Grief Weston 2026

I love the concept of the Good Grief Weston festival, which offers a varied programme of events and activities that open up compassionate conversations around death, dying and bereavement. I feel lucky and honoured to be hosting a ★ listening event: The Stars Look Very Different Today: An Evening with David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ Ten Years on – with Leah Kardos.

This is the write up from the listing:

On his sixty-ninth birthday in January 2016, David Bowie released Blackstar. Two days later he died. Made through illness, the album looks death in the eye and meets it with creativity, mischief and grace.

Ten years on, join musician and writer Leah Kardos for an evening in the album’s company. The author of Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2022), Leah will reflect on how Blackstar was made and what it can mean: how Bowie turned his own ending into art, and how his final work invites us to cherish our transience rather than fear it. 

Then, as night falls, we listen to the album Blackstar together. Bring a warm layer. Weather permitting, we end the evening with the stars.

I think this is going to be a special night! Here's hoping for clear skies...

Info: 16 October, 2026, 7.30pm - 9pm
Tickets from £5

Where: The Grand Pier, Marine Parade, Weston-super-Mare, BS23 1AL

Sensation: The Sounds, Visions, and Words of David Bowie

I will be delivering a keynote presentation at this conference: Sensation: the sounds, visions, and words of David Bowie on the 29th of September, at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. I've been to Kristiansand a few times now, most memorably covering the always-excellent Punkt festival for The Wire. I can't wait to return. Also, I'm quite excited as this will be my first keynote talk at a conference.

My talk is called “Excavating The Next Day: Bowieism and the sounding archive", dipping back into the pool of research I was engaged with for Blackstar Theory, now updated and extended after some enlightening trips to the V&A David Bowie Archive.

For more information about the conference, which also has keynote contributions coming from Jonathan Barnbrook and Sigbjørn Nedland and a raft of fascinating Bowie scholarship in store, check out the links to the conference programme here.

Associate Professor

Apologies for the "thrilled to announce" style post, but I was promoted to Associate Professor in Music at Kingston School of Art. I'm going to relish updating my email signature today.

Deliberate Unfamiliarity

I have a research fellowship this summer with the 21st Century Music Practices network. The project, for now, is called Deliberate Unfamiliarity, and to cut a long research question and methodology statement short, means that I will spend two months working with two machines I do not know how to use: a Behringer LM Drum and a Hologram Microcosm. The bit that I'm most interested in is the absence of a keyboard - no easy way to feel and make harmony and melody, none of the moves my hands already know.

I've been at it for a few weeks now, and already I can feel my brain melting a bit. In a good way (I think).

I am putting the results up as I go: Baby's first drum machine.

Elizabeth Price's WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU

Elizabeth Price's new moving-image work WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU opened at Manifesta 16 in the Ruhr. I did the sound design and musical score with her, as I did on HERE WE ARE for the Liverpool Biennial last year. Both pieces are showing there together. They are the first two parts of a trilogy about Catholic modernism, and we are starting work on the third.

Click the link below to see parts of the work, and to read more about it. It's fascinating and moving and educational and mesmerising.

Commissioned by Manifesta 16, funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU

Kentronica

Here we are, the current Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra, backstage at the Kentronica festival at the Gulbenkian in Canterbury. The line-up was insanely impressive: Anna Phoebe headlining alongside Sophie Sirota, Mieko Shimizu, Shape Navigator and Laurie Black. Huge thanks to the Coastal Electronauts for inviting us, and (as always) Dubreq, for the wonderful support.

Kentronica

Photograph by Arthur Blanchard.

Irmin Schmidt, Invisible Jukebox

Pinch me, I was asked to do the Invisible Jukebox interview with THE Irmin Schmidt of Can(!)

What a mensch. We chatted about music for over 2 hours, and he had some strong opinions! I enjoyed it so much - a genuine life highlight.

"You can look at a landscape. It's beautiful. But only once a part of it is framed in a photo, can it be more... once it has a frame, it's a piece of art."

The Wire, issue 507, May 2026.

The Art of Staying Strange

I really enjoyed taking part in the "The Art of Staying Strange" event at Libreria bookstore in London. I was joined by two other 3 1/3 authors for a three-way convo about pop music that stubbornly goes against the grain - Elliott Simpson who wrote Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, and Anthony Gomez III who wrote Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See. Obviously I was there repping Hounds Of Love in my Before the Dawn tour T-Shirt.

The Art of Staying Strange

Dublin Bowie Festival

Dublin puts on the best Bowie party, hands down. I was so pleased to be invited back to take part. On the Friday, a Station to Station listening party at Whelan's and a fun conflab with Pat McCarty and John Brereton.

On the Sunday morning, "I'm A Blackstar" at the Royal College of Surgeons, with guitar legend Gerry Leonard and Róisín Ingle. Later that afternoon, "Books for Kooks", convened by Eoin Devereux, alongside Peter Quinn and Helena Mulkerns. Each of us chose one book from Bowie's list of a hundred to discuss - I brought Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor.

Listening party · I'm A Blackstar · Books for Kooks.

Image by Liz Tray

A foreword for Karl Bartos

I wrote the foreword to the Omnibus Remastered edition of Karl Bartos's The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond. I didn't expect to see my name on the cover like that. Look mum, full honorific!

It's a great book that is about much more than Kraftwerk... it is also a treatise on listening, and a warning about what happens to us, and to the art we make, when we defer our humanity (and our human connections) to technology. And Karl's writing about the Kraftwerk years, usually flattened into myth, are restored here to the grain of labour. Highly recommended.

The Sound of the Machine

Talking History, Newstalk

January has been a very Bowie month indeed. Here, I was honoured to join Eoin Devereux and Harriet Reed on Talking History for Newstalk, presented by Patrick Geoghegan, for an hour of chat on Bowie's legacy and influence. Recorded a good while before it went out, which is usually how these things go.

Listen to the episode

Attack Decay Sustain Release

Attack Decay Sustain Release ran at the Stanley Picker Gallery from 20 January to 28 March, featuring work by artists in residence Sophie Huckfield, Nnena Kalu, Rebecca Kressley, curator Lisa Slominski, and Abbas Zahedi.

My involvement, aside from helping to come up with the title (it's good, hey!) was putting Kingston School of Art sound work in the gallery alongside the fellows. I ran it as an open call, and a range of projects were proposed, from students across undergraduate, taught postgrad and PhD levels in KSA Performing Arts.

A lot of attention around the event went to Nnena Kalu, who had just won the Turner Prize six weeks before we opened, and rightly so. Nobody wrote about the students, so here they are:

• Thomas Boulousis, PhD
• Chloe Kirson-Jones, PhD
• Richard Crow, PhD
• Lane Fox, MA Music
• Artie Sanida, BA Hons Music Technology
• Francesca Williams and Adimesh Baidwan, BA Hons Music Technology
• Fin Beresford and Amy Gardner, BA Hons Music Technology

Circadia, a project from On The Record CIC with Kingston University Nursing, also took a slot to run a pilot of their immersive oral history art installation that captures 100 years of nursing stories and sequences them to clock time, sound, music and a moving light sculpture. I have since joined the project, as a collaborator in KSA and under the aegis of the Visconti Studio.

Anyway, it was great! Here's a link: Attack Decay Sustain Release

Bowie in Time at the British Library

David Bowie in Time was a day at the British Library marking ten years since Bowie's final work and his passing, built around his preoccupation with time. I was on the Blackstar panel with Donny McCaslin and Jonathan Barnbrook, chaired by Nemone, who stepped in at short notice for Mary Anne Hobbs. THE Jehnny Beth introduced us. Big thanks to Arsalan Mohammad and Jon Fawcett for putting on such a fine event, and for inviting me.

The whole day was filmed, including the cabaret with Jehnny Beth and Blixa Bargheld. You can find these videos online, just like you can watch our panel here. Image by Liz Tray.

The David Bowie Centre

Lucky little me got to spend an afternoon at the David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse with Tony Visconti, Donny McCaslin, Arsalan Mohammad and others, looking at material from the archive. Instruments, equipment, and in the pic above, that's Tony and I poring over Bowie's working notes for ★.

Bit of a special day, one I won't forget anytime soon.

First photograph by Arsalan Mohammad, last one by me.