pastoral modern composition · piano
Ambient work asks you to be patient in a world that isn't. That's a strange way to spend your twenties, thirties, whatever this is.
There's no roar of a crowd in pastoral modern composition; there's a person, somewhere, listening alone at midnight. I try to make it for them.
It's a quiet life. Mostly I'm grateful for 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.
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.
In the lineage of Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Ludovico's quiet school, if I'm honest.
Lately everything I write bends back toward East to West.
I wrote it at the piano, mostly late, mostly by deleting.
It isn't a message — it's company for a particular hour.
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.
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” — 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.
