Interview: ABC Radio

Interview with Andrew Ford on ABC Radio’s The New Music Show, about balancing ‘human frailty’ with electronics, silliness vs transcendence, rhythm, and Hope Spiral. From February 2026.

Excerpt

Andrew Ford: So you’ve got this fixed element in terms of what is recorded, or artificial, and then something which is not fixed in quite the same way. Even if you’ve notated the music, nevertheless, human frailty is involved in executing it. Is that part of the tension at the heart of your music?

BN: Yeah, definitely. I feel like that’s sort of the source of everything, in a way. Because I’ve been making this kind of music since I was in university, and at the start I would just make a track in Logic and I would play along to it on piano. And that was kind of my laboratory/experimental ground for making whatever sounds I wanted and exploring all these different ways you can relate to a track, to a fixed thing. As a human performer, like you said, with all these ‘frailties,’ how do you fit into this really rigid thing, and how do you interact with it in a way that still gives space for freedom? And I feel like I’ve just taken that format and I’ve been applying it to all these different mediums like string quartets and orchestras, and each time it’s an interesting question of how you give enough space for the humanity. But also how do you augment the human side with this other, weirder, technological thing, and find a blend that feels satisfying and not just jarring and random.

AF: The other balancing act which I think you’re very good at - there is this teetering on the edge between silliness and transcendence. How do you stay on the right side of that?

BN: Yeah, I think about this a lot actually. And this is part of the doubt I have about trying to find the balance between something that feels playful but not gimmicky. I like drawing people into this space that feels light and playful, but then subtly, gradually, as the piece goes on, it opens up and morphs into something that’s maybe surprisingly serious or has a depth to it that you didn’t realise was there. There are a lot of amazing movies that do that and you end up at the end and you’re like ‘how did I arrive here?’ So I feel like sometimes the playfulness is good at coaxing the listener in, as opposed to starting from a very serious place and then you’ve set it up to be this really important, serious thing. But I don’t know. I feel like on a basic level, I just try and- no matter how silly or playful the sounds you’re using are, there’s as much care as possible put into why they’re there and how they’re arranged, so it feels logical and not random.

AF: When listening to your music, you hear the interaction between the recorded sounds, or the samples, and the live sounds, and you clearly hear the pop culture references, and that would seem to be what the music is about. But I found that the more I listened, the more it seemed to me that what your music was really about was rhythm, and in particular, the kind of rhythm that Stravinsky was interested in, to do with cutting things up into very small pieces of unequal length and stringing them together.

BN: I grew up playing drums, that was my main instrument, and I switched to piano around 10, but I was still kind of playing piano like the drums at the start. When I messed around and improvised on the piano I wasn’t really interested in harmonic progression or melody. I would just take these cells, like different drum patterns, and play with the arranging of them. And a lot of the music I write now is still in that kind of modular format where you have these blocks of sound and you’re just juggling them around, and the energy of the piece, or the creativity of it, lies in the endless ways you can arrange these things. Even though it’s a simple technique I feel like you can generate so much momentum just through that.

AF: There are five humans in Hope Spiral, string quartet and horn. Perhaps you could tell us about the piece, starting with the tital.

BN: I thought of the title ‘Hope Spiral’ because- I was thinking about spirals, and how you usually depict them as going down, and we link them to negative things like thought spirals or anxiety spirals, like not being in control of your own thoughts and things spiralling out of control. And in this piece I was thinking about joy, hope and gratitude, and all these things that I feel, as you go through life, you have to find ways of renewing, so that you can stay connected to what’s actually meaningful. And no matter how familiar or tedious life might feel sometimes, you can find ways to reconnect with that sense of gratitude of like ‘oh, I’m here. I’m here again. My surroundings are beautiful.’

So I was picturing a spiral that goes upwards, like inverted, and imagining something that shoots up to the sky, like a plane taking off on a runway and then arriving above clouds. At the climax of the piece, there’s a big build up section and the music gets faster and faster. In Logic I put the tempo to go up to 990BPM, which is the highest it can go to, and there’s a simple G major chord that’s repeated in the electronics and by the players. And what I realised was when you speed up a chord that fast, it stops being heard as individual notes and just becomes a drone, so it plateaus and you get this huge wash of sound. That felt really like that metaphor of a plane taking off a runway, ascending above clouds and then there being complete stillness.