My new album the night is dark, the night is silent, the night is bright, the night is loud is out on the 12th of October via Art As Catharsis, and I'm going to be launching it at Venue 505 on Cleveland St in Sydney. Get your tickets here!
Support will come from my wonderful & talented friends / cohorts Sophie Hutchings playing a solo piano set, and Alon Ilsar playing a solo set with his mind-boggling Air Sticks.
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:
When I collaborated with pleq (see here) on his remix of Ben Lukas Boysen, there was also some beautiful additional piano contributed by French pianist Julien Marchal. We vowed to work together more in the future, and Julien kindly invited me to remix one of his pieces from his album INSIGHT II (and prodded me when I dragged my feet).
So here it finally is! There is also a Q&A available at Julien's site with some, er, "insight" into the creative process behind this remix, and my work more broadly.
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 was recently asked to perform with the wonderful Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance at the annual TEDxSydney. After some brief email conversations, we met the night before the event, had a chat and determined that it would be as spontaneous as possible. We discussed a few ideas, soundchecked, and that was it!
Slightly nerve-wracking on the day, but I'm pretty happy with the results – and very happy that the TEDx & Sydney Opera House teams captured the sound (and vision) so well! (And James Orr's excellent live sound no doubt had a lot to do with it too.)
Some things coming up!
On Friday the 19th of December I'm supporting and playing with Ben Fink & Dale Caldwell's sparse anti-folk act Close to Forever. Should be a magical evening.
And on January 30th (also a Friday), I'll be playing a quite different gig courtesy of Tenzenmen at Black Wire, supporting Hinterlandt Ensemble and Beijing's Guiguisuisui, rounded out by Milkk. Can't wait!
Sadly had to pull out of this show due to certain FourPlay happenings with Neil Gaiman…
I do have a whole unreleased studio album sitting around wanting a good home. It's different, but I'm sure you'll like it. Stay tuned…
