Commissioned by Smorgaschord Festival. World première given by Ben Goldscheider at Chapter House, Christ Church College, Oxford, 17th June 2023

The ‘Halali’ in the title of this piece refers to a call that appears in numerous collections of hunting calls from seventeeth-century France. ‘Halali’ is called as the exhausted animal is surrounded and killed by huntsmen with knives. The reality of the hunt — ritualised slaughter with the veneer of nobility — is important to this piece. But so are the immediate, embodied aspects of horn-playing, the physical exertion that the music demands, and the progressive exhaustion wrtten into the music’s incrementally flattening pedal tones.

Commissioned by Zubin Kanga for the album Cyborg Pianist, released on NMC 29th September 2023. World première given by Zubin Kanga at Kings Place, 30th September 2023.

Counterfeits (Siminică) is a series of five small pieces, arranged in a chain, which together form an imperfect, partial rendering of ‘Afara e Ituneric’ as recorded by the great Romanian singer Dona Dumitru Siminică. Much of the material for the piano is freely composed around basic material from the recording. None of the voices recorded on the vocal patch for this piece belong to Siminică. 

Commissioned by Zubin Kanga with funds from the RVW Trust. Preview performance of movements 1 and 2 given by Zubin Kanga at Nonclassical @ The Victoria, London on May 22nd, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. First complete performance given by Zubin Kanga at Kings Place, London on November 29th 2019. French première given by Zubin Kanga at Maison de la Radio France, Festival Présences, Paris, 14th February 2020.

Absorber is about outdated, ugly sounds. and the ways in which memories, both nostalgic and traumatic, enable them to acquire new associations and meanings. Listeners of my generation were surrounded by these sounds during childhood and adolescence. In spite of their crudeness, there is something haunting and beautiful about them.

Movement 1, ‘Homerton Hospital 050989’, uses a synthesised choir sound similar to the ones found in 1980s pop music, and surrounds it with a clunking ground bass and flurries of birdsong in the piano; Movement 2, ‘Solos’, is a solo for Rhodes Electric Piano which goes badly wrong; Movement 3, ‘Threes’, is a manic scherzo built entirely from parallel major triads, and uses the bright, synthesised piano chords heard in 1990s house music. Movement 4 ‘Gordon Hospital 101018’, sits apart from the other three movements, in that it is for piano only.