'One thin cry / Between wavecrash and circling wolves of wind'
Writing
I'm a Scottish writer, poet and musician, born in Glasgow in 1972. I’ve lived in Edinburgh since 1995. I'm very fond of cats.
You can read the posts on this site here.
I've had poems published in aswirl, whiptail: journal of the single-line poem and Password: journal of very short poetry.
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.
My email is on the contact page. You can also find me on Mastodon.
Music
I’ve been involved in experimental music since 1990, and my work takes in acoustic and electric instruments, electronics, field recordings and other things which interest me, including the practice of improvisation. Since early 2023, I've found my way back to the electric guitar, an instrument with which I've had an on/off relationship for nearly 40 years.
I'm always interested in opportunities for playing and recording with other improvising musicians.
Between 2000 and 2003 I curated the techNOH netlabel, one of the first of its kind, with over 30 free releases of cutting-edge experimental electronic music by artists from around the world.
I ran the Dust, Unsettled CD label from 2006 until 2016, releasing my own work and that of others.
I've worked with a number of other people over the last 30 years:
- Radios, with Richard Youngs. 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.
- Inversion, with Caroline McKenzie, a largely improvising electronics duo; we recorded a lot of material but released very little of it.
- Space Weather, with Caroline and Andrew Paine. Two albums of trio interstellar explorations were released, as well as a short EP.
- Fougou with Matthew Shaw, exploring the sonics of stones and the Other.
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).