Listening to the world
“As an only child, I passed the time by collecting things… and later when my parents bought me my first cassette recorder, I collected sounds.”
(The Family Album, 2005)

Biography
CV

My practice engages with the contemporary sound world to consider what it has to tell us about the prevailing culture and social conditions. It begins with the creative process of soundwalking – listening to, and then recording everyday sounds, to engage in a deeper and more immersive understanding of place. I use the binaural recording technique to record soundscapes, a process in which the entire body becomes a microphone; both allowing the recordist the freedom to roam without unwanted attention and concentrating the mind into a meditative state, bringing with it a level of attentiveness that I believe is transferred into the quality of the resulting recordings. Back in the studio, I work with these field recordings in different ways to produce gallery and museum installations, compositions, sound designs, film soundtracks, podcasts and radiophonic works. 

In parallel, I continue to investigate the historic connections between the post-digital era and the early decades of modernism, in the form of social movements that challenge and continue to disrupt the fabric of our society. I reflect upon this through a form of artistic activism, exploring ‘sonic agency’ (Labelle, 2019) through composition, collage and narrative, and recycling and repurposing the digital junk of a global marketplace. My performative alter ego, Giuseppe Marinetti, Conceptual Politician and Radical Crooner, and founder of the Neo Futurist Collective continues to lead a now defunct artist group that draws its inspiration from the Milan Futurists and, in particular, Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises manifesto.

Whether recording and reworking the views of the public on democracy in Revolution #10, exploring the soundscape of the natural world, or adapting the sound of Berlin coffee shops to evoke a “Shoreditchification” of the high street, my aim is to show how a simple, quiet act of listening can become a radical intervention in the noise and clamour of contemporary society.