I have finished my modern day Tone Poem/Symphonic Poem 'Kingley Vale' a challenge I accepted from my friend Richard Howard and inspired by a magical place in the South Downs, UK. Kingley Vale is a mixture of ancient Yew Forests, Steep Hills and antiquated burial mounds. the Yew Trees are believed to be up to two thousand years old, the burial mounds even older.

A Tone Poem was a descriptive, orchestral, programmatic piece inspired by a certain place or situation. I walked up Kingley Vale many times as a young child, then as an adult. This music was based on the first of those journeys that I can remember - I would have been about seven. When I was three quarters of the way through writing the music, I decided to take a trip down there, as lockdown was easing. it's only 10 miles away from where I live. It all seemed amazingly familiar, despite the fact that I haven't been there for many years..

I feel like I have gone back to school. The two projects in particular that I am working on are both educative and inspiring, but I would not have thought to do them without being nudged into them. The first, I have been meaning to do for a while, but was waiting to finish my tenth Digitiphony before letting it engross me. I first heard Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen a few years ago, and it had a profound effect on me. I knew then that one day I would have to have a go at re-interpreting it in Digitiphonic style, but this idea was accelerated greatly when my friend, and music engraver, Graham Hall transcribed the whole thing for me (in a week ! - that would have taken me a year if I had tried to do it) into Dorico, which meant that instead of squinting at a pocket score I could port over midi files from Dorico to my DAW, saving me loads of time and inspiring me at the same time, also leaving me with enough energy to re-envisage Strauss' notes through electro-orchestral ears, and also to play with the idea of using the words by Goethe that first inspired him to write the music (it was going to be a choral piece originally, apparently) to take the music into the vocal realm as well as the Digitiphonic one. The second project is a challenge from my friend Richard Howard who, when I completed Digitiphony 10, suggested I write a Tone Poem. This musical form, though more something from the end of the 19th Century/beginning of the 20th than something employed in the 21st, first piqued my interest when I became obsessed with Bax's 3rd Symphony ('Tintagel' by Arnold Bax is one of the best known Tone Poems) and apparently Richard had been thinking for a while I should have a go at composing one. He said I needed to remember a place that meant a lot to me, and base it on that. I had no trouble remembering a place - Kingley Vale in the South Downs, which I first went to as a young child - it was a yew forest, burial mounds, steep hills and a view down to the Solent and English Channel from the top. It is a completely magical place. The reason I feel as if I am back at school is because to complete the challenge I feel I should only use orchestral instruments - as composers who wrote Tone Poems (Symphonic Poems) did, 'back in the day' - despite my natural inclination to compose in Electro, as well as Orchestral, soundscapes.

I have two new videos out - one video made by VJ Sadler Johnson of a Trance Edit from Digitiphony 4, also a Teaser Video for Digitiphony 10, which is now available on all internet music platforms

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From now until 3rd January 2021, when 'A Quantum Mass' is released, there will be a full length preview of the entire album on this site, both on the Homepage and here - 

In February of last year, while on holiday in Aldeburgh, Suffolk I woke up very early one morning as the bed in our hotel was so uncomfortable. I walked down to the beach just as the sun was rising over the North Sea. It was an incredibly still, foggy morning, that was destined to become a day of clear blue skies. As the sun rose and burnt through the fog I stood, listening to the waves lap up around my feet, and then started videoing the sunrise on my phone. When I got home I realised that the morning had been so still that the audio of the waves was in fact very useable (normally wind noise would overwhelm all the other sounds) so I wrote an ambient piece of music to go with the tranquil sound of the waves. It is only this year that I have got round to finishing the piece as I have been so busy working on Digitiphony 10 (even though I put the video I made last year up on youtube) and today that track, called 'Suntide' was released on all the streaming services - Spotify, Apple, Tidal etc and also as downloads on Bandcamp