Music Production meets Performance
My journey with music has evolved through a mix of live shows and studio production, with each show and opportunity furthering my understanding of how sound can connect with audiences. Early on, found myself in the world of dance music, performing at festivals including WOMAD, Boomtown Fair, and the International Ska Festival at the O2 Academy Islington. Performing at these fesitvals taught me how to captivate audiences on the dance floor.
During this period, I led the JSSO Project, where I worked with some brilliant musicians who played live brass while i operated the electronic side of the show with various electronic equipment. This was a deep dive into how production could enhance live performance. The brass section added beautful harmony and texture, I used additive and subtractive digital effects, delay sends, and feedback loops to create a live augmented evolving sound. Using real-time manipulation and drawing inspiration from dub plate techniques, the project gained this never ending evolving sound. Around this time, I also collaborated with local artist GRIZ-O, performing and operating beats for his shows as part of the Brownswood Future Bubblers program was a real honour, working with GRIZ-O showed me valuable lessons about rhythm, flow, and the power of genre-blending to create something fresh.
As my work progressed, I found myself drawn to more experimental approaches to sound, experimenting with contact microphones to explore the sound of objects rather than the air and different ways to listen back to music including building speakers and being involved with a number of small sound systems for a series of late night events, we experimented with different speaker positioning and room shape to make the best parties we could with the limited equipment we had access to. Showing key lessons in room acoustics and behaviour of the low frequencies.
One pivotal experience was my exploration of the db SoundScape system at The Good Shed in Stroud. This allowed me to experiment with spatial sound in a multi-speaker environment, helping me to understand ways to break the traditional ways of experiencing music. The system has the ability to manipulate sound in space.
This shift towards more experimental music aligned with the beginnings of my long-term collaboration with Squidsoup, an art collective focused on immersive, site-specific audio and visual installations. Over the years, I’ve brought my expertise in production and sound design to their projects, helping to bring their artistic concepts to life. Often Squidsoup projects are quite experimental and require creative audio problem-solving. The collaboration often called for innovative solutions—whether it was creating immersive, spatialised sound using multi-speaker setups or crafting audio solutions for far-out conceptual briefs. These challenges pushed me to think in new ways, finding ways to combine sound, space, and technology to produce unique experiences for the audience.
I’m incredibly grateful for the people I’ve met and collaborated with along the way—whether in my hometown, through creative spaces like the Stroud Valleys Artspace, or more recently in Cornwall and collaborators at Squidsoup. Everyones support and creativity have been fundamental to my development.
Today, my music merges all of these experiences: live performance meets the precision of studio production. Whether I’m creating beats, crafting sound environments, or exploring minimalism and spatial sound, my goal is to take the audience on a journey, leaving them with an experience that lingers after the music stops.
