Martin Nutt, TMN. Trichromatic Moiré (score), 2017

It's January, and summer in Dunedin. The empty days are stark and long and bright, and there is a held silence to my part of the city, up on the ridge. A poise, as if the new year is delaying itself as long as it can, not quite ready to begin. 

Harsh, caustic, white South Island light, framed in the warped late-19th century windows, sketches across surfaces, creating heavily delineated geometries on scarred floors of native hardwood and 1930s celadon green attic room walls, an irregular angular architecture, shifting with the rotation of the day. The wind-torn doppler effect of exuberant childrens' voices normally audible from the school over the road is now silent, and my house is a wooden, many-caverned ear, listening-in to the tiny sounds of the outside. Its two stories are a creaking ship, cool and dark and solid, yet crooked open to the emptiness and brilliant light.

I'm currently spending time in this house in my upstairs attic studio, working on a piece for Martin Nutt, the British-born, Japan-based composer, for a CD release in early March, as part of 2018's Audiograft Festival. This festival is held annually by the Sonic Art Research Unit (SARU) at Oxford Brookes University, UK. I'm one of a few artists sent the score for TMN. Trichromatic Moiré (2017).

Medium: Paranormal Field Recordings and Compositions, 1901-2017

An exhibition titled Medium, showing at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia, USA, between August 29 - December 3, 2017, will feature recordings from my project collected huia notations (like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded).

The exhibition considers the possibility of communication with the unknown, collecting together over thirty multimedia works from contemporary artists, as well as historical objects ranging from 1920s séance transcripts and Soviet Cold War-era “bone records", and archival materials from University of West Georgia, Ingram Library, Special Collections, William G. Roll Papers; the collection of Dr. Patricia Poulter; and the American Society for Psychical Research, Inc., the show "considers how intangible vestiges of the past haunt our contemporary world," aiming to "introduce a space to talk about things we don’t truly understand and to experience the impact of history as it lingers in our present."

Medium is presented in conjunction with a vinyl record, Medium: Paranormal Field Recordings and Composition, 1901-2017, functioning as an audio supplement to the exhibition, which features sound recordings selected by Ben Coleman, including previously unreleased Poltergeist Recordings from the Society for Psychical Research in the United Kingdom as well as compositions by Dedekind Cut, Eluvium, and Frank Perry.

further details about the exhibition & the record can be found here

'Andrei Tarkovsky: Another Kind of Language', 3CD re-release on and/Oar.

Released just months before the 20th anniversary of the filmmaker's death, the quiet emergence of the re-release of the Tarkovsky tribute initially put together by Dale Lloyd's Seattle based label and/Oar in 2003, was aptly timed. Like a small expanded cinema exercise in itself, this package included a 20 page booklet and 3 CDs, two including compositions from the original release, and the last with contributions from seven new artists. I contributed a new track, 'for shoring up the past, as though with timber', and wrote an impressionistic essay for the liner notes, called 'there is only here and now, and light'. Full info on the release (where there are still copies left, at the time of writing) is available at and/Oar. Thanks so much to Dale Lloyd for his work and faith.  

"at home" a collaboration by radio cegeste & moth

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

under the moth moniker, Jon Dale's occasional sonic missives have been collectively described by one commentator as an "incredibly haunting, rich dronescape." certainly, Jon is pretty much an honorary New Zealander when it comes to evoking the kinds of beautiful isolationism one might normally associate with an everyday familiarity with South Island landscapes, and one of the most assiduous and eloquent writers on that particular experimental idiom to be found anywhere.




staying for a week in Jon's apartment in Brunswick, Melbourne c.2011, resulted in this. we called it "at home" because that's where it was recorded.

'if witness was an architect' by radio cegeste & lee noyes, released on idealstate no-number series

Recorded live at Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Dunedin New Zealand
17 January 2011

released 02 August 2013

performing in the light, white spaces of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery mezzanine auditorium with Lee Noyes in january 2011 solidified a productive collaboration that continued until Lee left Dunedin for Scandinavia in 2012. this is a recording of that initial performance, and its digital release on the 'no number' series Lee has been producing for his Idealstate Recordings label perfectly reflects its sparse, suspended minimalism.

a brief note on the title : 'if witness was an architect" - it is a line taken from a February 1888 newspaper report on the Seacliff Building Inquiry from the Otago Daily Times. This governmental inquiry into the 1887 collapse of the buildings at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, near Dunedin, eventually held the architect, Robert Arthur Lawson, responsible for structural defects. At the time of the recording of "if witness was an architect" I was living in another of Lawson's grand Victorian buildings, the (very structurally intact) 1903 mansion Threave. the performance included, apart from mini FM radio transmission, various other forms of electromagnetism and related sonic elements, some field recordings i had gathered in the (now empty field) of the former Seacliff Asylum.

folding a coastline into a shipwrecked space, track contribution to 'Somewhere on the Edge', Gruenrekorder 100

My contribution to german label Gruenrekorder’s 100th release, a compilation of field recordings entitled 'Somewhere on the Edge' released in early May 2012, is entitled 'folding a coastline into a shipwrecked space' and is available for streamed listening or download, here.

radio cegeste / lee noyes 'to orient themselves with coastlines' released on idealstate recordings

with the prospect of the Radio Cegeste / Lee Noyes live collaboration coming to an end for the foreseeable future upon Lee's relocation from Dunedin, NZ to Gothenburg, Sweden in the final days of 2011, his decision to release two site-specific recordings we had done in the previous months as a four-track album on his own idealstate label resulted in to orient themselves with coastlines (ISR2-12), in an edition of 100 copies. With the official release date as the 7th january 2012, these are at the time of writing available at the idealstate site, and via French distributor Metamkine.