My longtime friend in improv, Clayton Thomas, has organised improv & experimental performances in Sydney for decades. He spent some time in NYC & Berlin but has been back here for a while, and in response to the genocide in Gaza, he has convened an ensemble called SOUND THE ALARM to try and do just that – use our musical voices to draw/retain/re-activate attention on the terrible crimes being committed by the State of Israel (in the name of Jewish safety, something I must use my own Jewish voice to categorically reject).
It's been a moving experience to perform with some remarkable improvisers at a number of happenings over the last year, one of which was a recording in a new Marrickville space at 21 Shepherd St, run by Michelle St Anne. That recording, with one substantial 42-minute work and two relatively shorter ones, is now released by Relative Pitch Records.
The third one is particularly beautiful and bracing. Over 12½ minutes, Maissa Alameddine reads the names of children murdered in Gaza before they reached 1 year old – an incomplete, still-growing list. It took minutes before it began to feel possible to insert our own sound, and I began to breathily play a mournful ostinato. As one of Marrickville's ubiquitous planes flew overhead, other instruments joined.
It's a rarity, I think, for free jazz/improv to be imbued with so much meaning (much though I am a wholly-engaged fan of the genre/non-genre). I'm very proud to be a participant.
You can stream/download it here, and CDs are available in various record stores. I have a handful if you'd like to contact me.

My new album is coming out on the 12th of October!
Pre-order is up now:

There's a lovely CD edition and digital. Thanks to the wonderful Art As Catharsis for helping me put it out.
Launch gigs coming soon…

Recently Lachlan Dale of Art as Catharsis invited me to perform at an excellent eclectic gig at the Hideaway Bar in Enmore. I opened the gig with a new track called "Solace", which he video'd and has now kindly uploaded. So here's something entirely new, performed on cello and loop pedal through a bass amp:

Finally available is the new EP from Polish artist Bartosz Dziadosz aka pleq, featuring one track for which I recorded some multi-tracked cello parts. It's a beautiful slowed-down remix of a Ben Lukas Boysen (aka Hecq), the original piano augmented by French pianist Julien Marchal. The overdubbed parts were improvised in our respective studios by us, and Bartosz added washes of sound and extra-twinkly production.

A video of our track was made by Ken Hirama.

The EP is available on Canadian post-classical/electronic label Moderna Records now:

A couple of years ago I recorded an album over two weekend sessions at the beautiful Music Feeds Studio, with engineering and mixing help from Chris Hancock. It's less electronic than a lot of my other stuff – much of it was aimed at realising my multi-layered looping pieces in lush acoustic multi-tracked recordings.
But the other half are extravagant pieces jammed, overdubbed, mixed and overdubbed right there in the studio.

I'm yet to release the album – entitled the night is dark, the night is silent, the night is bright, the night is loud. Once I've remixed a few tracks a little bit, I'll send it out into the world (maybe a like-minded label will help me there)… In the meantime, you can stream this track, which mixes up faux-guitar cello, rapturous arco fragments, helium harmonics and a couple of field recordings.

I've been working on some music in collaboration with Damian Gascoigne, who, as well as being the director of UTS's Bachelor of Design Animation, is a talented and groundbreaking animator in his own right. The first public fruits of his current work are currently showing as a projection-mapped installation on the beautiful spiral staircase inside Customs House in Sydney as part of SuperLux (Smart Light Cities) – and you should be able to hear an ambient looping version of my music as part of the installation.

In conjunction, I've released a two-track single featuring the original track and an extended, further-manipulated ambient dub mix as a pay-what-you-like single on Bandcamp:

I have a new track with Sophie Hutchings on this wonderful compilation of post-classical, drone & electronics on the Moscow label Dronarivm.
We recorded it at the Cafe Church in Glebe one night with just a stereo pair of mics, positioned near the piano, and I walked with the cello at the beginning and end to provide some true spatial dynamics. As with everything I do with Sophie, it's half-composed, half-improvised. And no electronics here.

We're at track 6, along with a pretty awesome array of other artists.

I've been recording at the old Megaphon studio in St Peters – now Music Lines – with the fabulous Mr Chris Hancock, towards a new album. This time I'm looking at sending it out to some like-minded labels rather than self-releasing.

Perhaps half the tracks are loop-based works painstakingly rendered in ProTools, and half are entirely studio-created, composed on the fly on cello, piano, pieces of metal and wood, synthesisers, out-board effects and computers.
It's been exhilarating and we haven't even started mixing yet!

I'll post one or two tracks as sneak previews once they're ready…

PS Oh also, raven is on Facebook now :)

While travelling in the US in November, I played a few fun improv gigs with different people, did some recording for my friend Tim Condon's amazing krautrock/noise band Fresh Snow, and recorded a little nachtmusik in a tiny cottage in a tiny town in upstate New York.
Here 'tis, unfiltered and unedited (well, there's 3 cello layers there):