'One thin cry / Between wavecrash and circling wolves of wind'
I'm a Scottish writer, poet and musician, born in Glasgow in the early 1970s. I’ve lived in Edinburgh since 1995.
My email is on the contact page. You can also find me on Mastodon.
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Music
I’ve been involved in improvised and experimental music since around 1990, and my work has involved acoustic and electric instruments, electronics, field recordings and other things which seemed fitting at the time.
The practice of improvisation is important to me. Since early 2023, I've found my way back to the electric guitar, an instrument with which I've had a relationship for nearly 40 years; more and more I feel my focus now is on improvisation and its endless possibilities. After all, it's always been there in every aspect of the music I've made.
I've worked with a number of other people over the last 30 years, including:
- Richard Youngs, on the Radios series. This is/was a ten album series of conceptual releases, each focused on a particular set of sound sources, processes and the notion of chiasmus. In 1997, we played at the South Bank Centre in London as part of the Flux festival of new music.
- Caroline McKenzie, as Inversion, a (mainly) improvising duo; we recorded a lot of material but released very little of it. We played a number of gigs in Glasgow.
- Space Weather, an improvising trio with Caroline McKenzie and Andrew Paine. Two albums were released, as well as a short EP.
- Fougou with Matthew Shaw, exploring the sonics of standing stones and the Other.
Writing
I've had poems published in aswirl, whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, Password: journal of very short poetry and dadakuku.
You can read the posts on this site here.
I’m half of Blind Roads Press with writer and walker Murdo Eason and half of Seacliff Press with author and poet Mark Valentine. You can see what we've produced on the Publications page.
The lines at the head of this page ('One thin cry...') are from The Wreck of the Archangel by Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown which can be found in his collection of the same name (London: John Murray, 1989).