I collect stones as totems. Eroded slowly or separated by force, they are distinct bodies – fractals of otherwise assimilated terrain. As atomised reminders of the slow permeability of solid they undermine location. The act of their removal and gathering elsewhere becomes a simple subversion of place as fixed position. Where becoming here.

Through its palette of DAXA-interfaced DX7,¹ piano, gongs, cymbals, bells, singing bowls and spectral processing, W/HERE ² is rooted in ideas of place and non-place. Compositions and recordings were made in various spaces over an extended period. These components were then gathered and arranged as a suite of nine parts, integrated yet interchangeable – precarious and contingent.

A core set of piano phrases emerge and recur in varying states of refraction. Built for the most part around half tone intervals they straddle fixed positions – pointing from without to the microtonal within. They move along apparently defined trajectories, but never seem to arrive or complete suggested arcs. When positions of potential resolve are approached, they are interrupted, punctuated or deflected elsewhere. From heavy dense chord stacks to delicate hovering tone clusters, I am pursuing the uncertain, the intangible.

FM synthesis is compelling and vast. I am interested in the points of convergence between its brittle, crystalline timbres and the inherent resonances of metal percussion. The coalescing of these timbral worlds has become intrinsic to my music and is significant throughout this work. Spectral processing blurs the provenance of the synthesised and the acoustic.

Being always harmonically incomplete or pointing away, what I hope persists is a music that feels exhaustive yet irresolved. Having lived with it for some time, I am still unsure where certain phrases and passages belong or occur, and often can’t bring specifics to mind. Sheridan Le Fanu speaks of a particular memory being ‘utterly indistinct; the imperfect recollection simply of a sensation’.³ This idea permeates the work and feels to me like the sense of being attentively lost when walking. Signifiers of the familiar are present but they do not sum to the known. Here becoming where.