Updates

Associate Professor

I was promoted to Associate Professor in Music at Kingston School of Art, in post from the first of August.

Deliberate Unfamiliarity

I have a research fellowship this summer with the 21st Century Music Practices network. The project is called Deliberate Unfamiliarity, and for two months I am working only with two machines I do not know how to use: a Behringer LM Drum and a Hologram Microcosm. No keyboard, no harmony, none of the moves my hands already know.

The question is which parts of what a trained body knows are tied to one instrument, and which travel.

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

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 are showing there together. They are the first two parts of a trilogy about Catholic modernism, and we are starting work on the third.

The film sets a post-war Catholic modernist church in Essen against a counterpart in London, both built on the bombed remains of the neo-Gothic churches they replaced. A drone flies inside the Marienkirche while first-hand accounts of wartime bombing scroll across the screen, drawn from Elizabeth Bowen, Anna Kavan and Heinrich Böll.

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

Where Are You Where Are You

Kentronica

The Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra played Kentronica at the Gulbenkian in Canterbury, taking over the adjoining Colyer Fergusson Hall. Anna Phoebe headlined, with Sophie Sirota, Mieko Shimizu, Shape Navigator and Laurie Black.

Kentronica

Photograph by Arthur Blanchard.

Irmin Schmidt, Invisible Jukebox

I did the Invisible Jukebox with Irmin Schmidt of Can: records played unannounced, for the guest to identify and respond to.

We ended on his new album Requiem, which opens with a recording made on his terrace in Provence. Two nightingales, frogs on the pond, a herd of sheep further off. "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."

The Wire, issue 507, May 2026.

The Art of Staying Strange

"The Art of Staying Strange" at Libreria: three 33 1/3 authors on records made at a deliberate remove from the noise. Elliott Simpson on Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, Anthony Gomez III on Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See, and me on Hounds Of Love.

The Art of Staying Strange

Dublin Bowie Festival

Three turns over the Dublin Bowie Festival weekend.

On the Friday, a Station to Station listening party at Whelan's: the album played through, then a discussion with Pat McCarty. Fifty years on.

On the Sunday morning, "I'm A Blackstar" at the Royal College of Surgeons, with Gerry Leonard, Bowie's musical director and guitarist through the late records. Róisín Ingle chaired.

That afternoon, "Books for Kooks", convened by Eoin Devereux, alongside Róisín Ingle, Peter Quinn and Helena Mulkerns. Each of us took one book from Bowie's list of a hundred and said what it did to him. I took Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor.

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

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.

It is a life story that is also a treatise on listening, and a book about what happens to us, and to the music we make, when we defer our humanity to technology. The Kraftwerk years, usually flattened into myth, are restored here to the grain of labour.

The Sound of the Machine

Talking History, Newstalk

I joined Eoin Devereux and Harriet Reed on Talking History for Newstalk, presented by Patrick Geoghegan, for an hour 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, curated by Lisa Slominski, with work by Sophie Huckfield, Nnena Kalu, Rebecca Kressley and Abbas Zahedi.

I was involved from the title onwards. My part was putting Kingston School of Art sound work in the gallery alongside the fellows. I ran it as an open call, and what came back spanned level 4 to PhD.

The press all went to Nnena Kalu, who had 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: they needed somewhere to run a pilot, and pitched for it. I have since joined the project, working on the sound through the Visconti Studio.

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 death, 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. Jehnny Beth introduced us.

The whole day was filmed.

Watch the panel

The David Bowie Centre

An afternoon at the David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse with Tony Visconti and Donny McCaslin, looking at material from the archive. Instruments, equipment, and Bowie's working notes for Blackstar.

I have written a good deal about those recordings. Reading the notes next to two of the people who made them is a different kind of knowing.

Photographs by Arsalan Mohammad and Leah Kardos.

Bowie Day at Foyles

I spent the tenth of January at Foyles for their Bowie Day festival, on a panel with Alexander Larman, whose Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie had been out a matter of weeks. Travis Elborough chaired, and took this photograph of the two of us afterwards.

Bowie Day at Foyles

Hilary Woods in The Wire

I wrote the Hilary Woods feature for The Wire's 2025 Rewind double issue. "Finding Her Voice", on Night CRIÚ, her third album for Sacred Bones: a record made after two instrumental albums, built on singing, children's voices, a brass band, and hiss collected from tape machines bought in charity shops.

The Wire, issue 503/504, January/February 2026. Photographs by Charlie Joe.

A video essay on "No Plan"

I made a video essay about "No Plan", to mark ten years since all of it happened. The other essays in the series come out of Blackstar Theory. This one is new work, though it leans on the book's reading of Lazarus as a bardo.

It is a deceptively simple song holding a large and possibly profound idea, and I am not certain I got to the bottom of it. Listening through and thinking about it again felt like good medicine.

Watch the essay