Excerpt

You won Best Choral Composition with Sol, You’ve written that this is a piece dedicated to the sun, can you talk to how this came to be?

To tell the truth, the whole sun thing came a little bit afterwards. Usually when I write, I have this idea or feeling or a certain intensity I want to get across. And as I’m writing, it sort of attaches itself to ideas, like the sun or paganism or something like that. I wanted to write something that was bright and shamelessly joyful – playful and alive. It feels like the music moves where it wants to go and does whatever it wants to do. So I connected that with how I feel being in the sun and feeling like ‘this day could be anything.’

What inspired you to use fragments of found conversation for the text in Sol?

The idea of everything, everywhere, all at once and getting that across in musical form is like a fixation and obsession for me. For the text in Sol, instead of saying ‘I’m going to do this text from this poem by whoever,’ I’m trying to get across snippets of everything happening all at once. I’m using lots of fragments of different conversations and stuff like that, or if it’s electronic music, sampling lots of snippets of random bits of music and shoving that into one piece as well. It’s the same idea, it’s just expressed in different ways.

In your other work, for example CLICKBAIT, you use a lot of clips taken from the internet that have their own cultural references attached. What draws you to this style of composing?

It’s something that I’ve been fixated on for a while. I don’t really know why. We live in a world where we have access to everything and we’re constantly bombarded with so much information and so many stories from around the world. You’re scrolling on social media and there’s some pictures of food and people’s holiday photos, then some atrocity happening elsewhere, and it’s all in the same stream of information. I don’t think humans have had to deal with that kind of thing before. This is all new and weird. I think – ‘How can I get across this ambiguous feeling’. There’s an anxiety to it but also like a thrill. If I’ve been spending a lot of time on Instagram there’s a part of my brain that feels a little bit unhinged. I almost feel high . . but it’s mixed in with a feeling of dread. It’s all mixed together like a ball.

Attention Fragmentation is also a constant theme in your composition…

It’s the same kind of idea. In a lot of my music there is a focus on saturation. Too much happening at once and then the extreme opposite to that, which is total stillness. It’s like an arctic landscape or like a neutral white room – that’s what I imagine. When I meditate, I imagine a white room, the opposite from the crazy bombarding chaos. I have those two binaries in opposition and I try and present them both at the same time. As the listener you try and navigate your way out the chaos to the white room.