with Electronics

for pierrot ensemble, percussion and fixed electronics (2025) - coming soon

for piano and fixed electronics (2025) - coming soon

for contrabass recorder and live electronics (2025) 

Duration: ca. 4'

made for breaking (NOT slicing) was commissioned by Larli Davies, and premiered on the 13th of June 2025 by Larli Davies at the Royal College of Music.

Programme note:

made for breaking (NOT slicing) is admittedly about the misinformation often spread about many medieval European swords – namely that they were actually used to break an enemy’s limbs, not to slice off limbs like much of popular media seems reflect. Bouncing off of this idea, I wanted to turn the sound of the recorder into a sword along with various comically medieval sounds (including an incredibly important crow call Larli put in special request for) and impacts, all of which is triggered by the dynamic envelope of the recorder into a mic setup.

To develop the material of this piece, I decided to look towards composer and abbess Hildegard von Bingen. As a composer both myself and Larli adore, I felt it fitting to use the opening material of her work for voice O ignis spiritus, and process it through a magic square, like the sound of the recorder being processed through the electronics: a “historical” sound being brought into the now via a modern technique/machine.

for soprano, stroh violin, trombone, and live electronics (2025) | text by Jess Bull Anderson

Duration: ca. 4' 30"

The vanishing point was written for Isabel Xu, Mira Steenbrugge, and Jess Bull Anderson for the RCM Contemporary Music in Action Project 2025.

Programme note:

The text for The vanishing point was written specially for this piece and collaboration between the original performers and me.

Me and Jess connected over our shared love for visual art, poetry, and our similar takes on contemporary classical music. After Jess shared a personal spiritual experience and a painting she had been in the process of creating, I asked her if I could create an additional dimension to the painting by creating music inspired by it. Of course, with the instrumentation including a soprano, I also knew I wanted to ask Jess if she would also write the text for this piece, effectively creating a multi-discipline installation of sorts with each component (painting, text, and music) each being separate whilst also being brought together in their mutual creation.

A big part of my own process in writing The vanishing point was the awareness of my performer’s capabilities. The trombone and violin were quite explicitly written with loose instructions or guidelines made to be broken and improvised freely over if they so desire.

In the original painting, there are 4 core colour components represented by the 4 performers of this piece. The trombone represents the orange energy/background, the violin represents the deep blue halo, the electronics representing the pale clouds, and the voice representing the yellow burst – the vanishing point.

for solo percussion and live electronics (2025)

Duration: ca. 6'

Paperflocks was commissioned by Sophie Stevenson, and premiered in the RCM Amaryllis Flemming Concert Hall on the 31st of March 2025.

Programme note:

Paperflocks has quite a simple concept that is essentially described in the title. As a child I thoroughly enjoyed making origami animals as I found it a calming and meditative experience. After finding my box of origami paper and some of the old paper birds and dragons I made, I found myself wondering what it would sound like if suddenly they all took off in a flurry of paper wings: hence Paperflocks.

Along the way of writing this piece my mind also wondered to the sound of old wind-up toys and so throughout the piece you will hear not only paper wings but also slightly wonky wind-up sounds.

The electronics I use are entirely reactive to the audio input of the percussionist, taking the amplitude and sonic characteristics and using them to effect various effect parameters that constantly move.

In the more set electronics, I overly both percussive birdwing sounds and paper tearing sounds, as I found that oddly they both have similar sonic characteristics.

for solo cello and fixed electronics

Duration: ca. 4' 30"

Cello-cello-revolutions was commissioned by Ozgur Kaya and premiered on the 27th of March 2025 by Kaya in the RCM Performance Studio.

Programme Note:

Based on arcade games and particularly on the game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) this piece is made to both challenge the performer and have them engage with the electronic track in a way similar to DDR that has them pre-empting the movement they must make through the repetition of patterns.

I wrote this piece with the instruction from Ozgur to make it “as ridiculous as possible,” whilst also taking account of both my own and Ozgur’s non-classical music. Included in the track is a “narrator” role: a figure who is supposed to guide you through a game, but seems to have a shorter temper here...

for solo horn and electronics (2024) 

Duration: ca. 4'

Programme Note:

Low-poly landscapes was inspired by early 2000s and 90s video game graphics. I find a lot of nostalgia in these types of graphics and gravitate a lot to these video games when/if I find time to play them. These landscapes found in these games inspired me to write in a “horn-call” style to reference the original purpose of the instrument. By then using effects to degrade the resultant audio to a similar quality to 2000s MP3 players, alongside reverb and delay modulation, the calls the horn makes in this piece passes over these low-poly landscapes and degrades over time, swelling into reverberant, nostalgic chambers.

Much of the horn writing in this piece takes inspiration from both Richard and Franz Strauss’ horn music. When I played horn as a performer, I always found their horn music to work incredibly well and particularly Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No.1. The opening of that piece is so incredibly epic and vast, but so idiomatic for the horn. I hold a lot of nostalgia for these pieces and so in a piece about nostalgia, I found places in this piece to indirectly reference this writing.

for solo recorder and tape loops (2024)

Duration: 5'

When I dreamt of rain was written for Luca Imperiale.

This piece was premiered on the 8th of March 2024, at the Royal College of Music, London in the 2024 Consort 21 concert, performed by Luca Imperiale (recorder) and Thomas Shorthouse (tapes).

Find a recording of this piece here.

Programme Note:

Written for the RCM Consort 21 project, 2024, When I dreamt of rain centres around the theme of childhood nostalgia, painting a picture of a peaceful dream, interrupted by the appearance of fire, before returning to calm again when rain finally falls.

The melodic lines in the piece dart around, and mimic the natural recordings found in the tapes, alongside the more synth-based loops directly recorded onto the tapes using a direct-in cassette recorder.

I chose to use cassettes and tape loops for this piece particularly for their dream-like character. The warbly, saturated sound world created by tape is exactly the atmosphere I wanted to create in this piece to circle around the recorder, which represents the dreamer/audience, and their journey through this world.