pastoral modern composition · piano
I make music about East to West and stillness, and I mean every note — but I won't pretend it's free.
Choosing quiet can look, from outside, like disappearing. Some days the calm I write about is the calm I most need myself.
If you make gentle music and feel overlooked, you are not doing it wrong. That is just the shape of it.
Everything on “From East to West” grows out of one thing: morning gardens.
The piano does the thinking here; I only choose what to keep.
I hope it meets you somewhere quiet.
I didn't plan “Morning Sun”. It arrived as the sound of East to West when no one is listening and asked to be finished.
I kept the takes that sounded like weather and cut the rest.
That is all it wants to be.
“The Boy” began with the idea of East to West — a small thing I kept circling.
I wrote it at the piano, mostly late, mostly by deleting.
It isn't a message — it's company for a particular hour.
Hope it keeps you company.
I don't choose heritage; it keeps choosing me.
I kept the takes that sounded like weather and cut the rest.
If it slowed you down for forty minutes, it did its job.
The method is dull and I'm proud of it — a piano, a quiet room, the delete key.
Most of a session ends up deleted. What survives is the piece.
Owed to Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Ludovico's quiet school. The rest I took by accident.
Erik Satie · Claude Debussy · Ludovico's quiet school · Federico Mompou · Harold Budd
Ordinary mornings turned into unhurried musical poetry.
I write pastoral modern composition on the piano. Mostly it's about East to West and morning gardens — ordinary things, made a little more visible.
There are a handful of records — “From East to West”, “Morning Sun”, “The Boy”, “The Day”, “The Girl” and more — and they belong together.
In the lineage of Erik Satie · Claude Debussy · Ludovico's quiet school · Federico Mompou · Harold Budd
One piano, and as little else as I can get away with.
Plays now and then, small rooms only, mostly around the UK — a hall, a back room, sometimes someone's front room. Nothing big. If you'd like to host one, get in touch.
