“My music has long attempted, amongst other things, to reconcile interest in aspects, such as regular pulse, from ‘Western’ (eg American) minimalism, with the sustained sonorities (drones) of ‘Eastern’ minimalism.
beautiful. . .like a drug, it’ll wreak havoc with tonal perception. . .astonishing“
Dusted
Complex sonorities morphing according to a gradual, perceptible process (Steve Reich’s idea) may typically transform one pitch element at a time by the interval of a semitone (the smallest unit acknowledged by Western art-music). The resulting semitonal chromaticism may also evoke the early 20th-century music I love; and regarding each such element not as ‘a note in a chord’ but as a partial — a harmonic ‘node’ within an acoustical spectrum — pays homage to the approach of my revered mentor Horatiu Radulescu.
The urge to reconcile musical contradictions always came naturally to me: my earliest acknowledged work widens its purview from the world of English experimental music — the ‘white-note-ish’ pieces of Howard Skempton and Hugh Shrapnel ca.1970 — to embrace influences such as Indian classical music or the radical minimalist Giacinto Scelsi, alongside titans of European modernism (Xenakis, Ligeti).
Markedly at odds with much contemporary production, I have in recent years increasingly strongly gravitated away from music mimicking superficial features of earlier minimalist work in favour of a return to a strictly systematic, even algorithmic, attitude to composition.”