Creative Collaborations
Listen, observe feel and do, are the four key elements necessary to understand to be a composer. With those elements firmly in mind then express yourself in your given medium, be it, music, painting, sculpture, graphic art, architecture, costume or web design, filming, photography, garden design, ship building, bricklaying etc, etc...
Each person's life journey happens simultaneously both on the inside and outside, but so often, we feel our lives to be in total turmoil. We feel as though we're being pulled in so many different directions by so many different circumstances at the same time and sometimes it's difficult to stand outside the whirlpool of influences and experiences to see what we are doing objectively. However, it must be, remembered that we, each one of us, creates our own personal storms by the choices we make in this life. We are responsible for ourselves.
I've always tried to sit still in the middle of my own storms to see, and observe, both it and myself, and have tried to remember how it feels. Every 3 or so months as a boy I would stand still and say "remember in this moment how all this around me feels"; it's a bit like an emotional marker for later life.
From the beginning, I've always listened, improvised, experimented, explored and paid close attention to how everything feels along this journey, and have been very fortunate to also compose in collaboration with many others on this path. I would say that my compositions are primarily based on my own life experiences and observations, which are so intensely personal that they become universal.
Collaboration means a willingness to adapt to and be sympathetic to other people's styles. To delight in another's person's ideas, ones you've never even dreamed of yourself and to, embrace them positively. It allows the creation of something greater than the sum total of the parts, as has been demonstrated in the albums with myself and Melissa Holding, Dilly Meah, Dominic Glynn, Oscar Gonzalez, Kevin Sterchi, Olley Gillespie, Achim Fischer, Olly Blanchflower, George Hadjineophytou and Richard Bundy (Maquenzie).
