NEST (2025)
released on Krim Kram
NEST is an expression of how I feel about home as refuge, of which everyone is deserving, but it's also an expression of my deep sadness about the seizure of home, occupation of land, and the violence of colonisation.
NEST is a Mass for the Tenant, not a Mass in the traditional sense, but I see the piece as a Mass for the tenants of the past and the present. NEST is also a critical response to the theme of home in Éamon de Valera's 1943 radio address, 'On Language and the Irish Nation'. With a libretto by Eimear Walshe, the line, "they come to make a ruin", repeats throughout the piece like a congregational response. A line that traverses periods and regions, it conjures different scenarios, from landlords to military forces to hired goons. The piece went in an unconscious musical direction of a Mass, channeling de Valera's sermon-like delivery of his 1943 broadcast, but I have realised I was getting at something else. Our relationships with where we live and where we call home, our 'nest', can embody a certain sacredness, even when those who have powers over where we live do not treat it as such. NEST carries a double meaning for this reason; it can be a place of total refuge and comfort, but it can also represent the seizure of property, of illegal occupation, and colonisation. The critical relationship with de Valera's antiquated, idealistic notion of the home is placed in stark contrast with the inherent violence of the privatisation of shelter and the disruption of the nest.
Improv from 2020 Covid-era video streams: How to Breathe, for harmonium and voice
ERRATA EP (2020)
errata - “mistakes, mistaken things”
The tracks that make up this EP are from a larger collection of piano, harp, and accordion improvisations recorded between 2012-2016. The common theme running through the pieces is that they were recorded without any intention of sharing them. They fill up multiple folders on my hard drive; part of an ongoing system of careless file management. They are very much diary and memory pieces, taking me back to a specific mood, a compositional idea that never worked out, or an idle moment where I sat down to follow blind intuition.
SPELLS FROM THE ICE AGE (2014)
released on Fort Evil Fruit
The pieces on Spells from the Ice Age were never recorded with the intention of releasing them. They started from my own guilt at neglecting my home piano, and the piano in general. I've lived away from home for over a decade now, and every time I've returned, I've peeped around the sitting room door to remorsefully look at the corner-block of spruce and ivory. Its sad upright posture looking in the middle distance, smelling of musk, weighed down by books and other crap from our house that accumulated on top of it. And then I think of the hours I spent with it. The energy I put into firing my schoolbag across the room, knocking things over in its flight to the corner, so I could rush to my piano seat. I'd stay there until I was told to stop and eat or do homework.
And of course the guilt encompasses the whole experience with the instrument. The neglected repertoire, technique, and practice habits that you no longer remember. A resentment sets in on yourself when you sit down to play - muscle memory refuses to cooperate. Large parts of Schubert, and other favourites, that were once played with a joyous, hyper-fluidity under your fingers, are now angular and disjointed - a computer glitch with important information missing.
I call the improvisations 'spells' because that's how I thought of them when I played. I pressed record on the field recorder and imagined I was cast under a spell of playing in a performance setting. There is an audience in front of me; the performance must carry on regardless of 'wrong notes' or lack of clarity and direction. I wanted the spells to conjure up my old playing technique – tapping at my muscle memory until it yawned and stretched and sat up.
Also, what grew out of the spells was the nervous excitement of composing from nothing - the forward momentum of composing against the minute hand on the wall, trying to sculpt a complete form through repetition and variation, and also creating space and silence to panic about where to go next! The recordings are raw and flawed, and I'm ok with that.