About me

I’m a writer, sound artist and wanderer, born in 1972 in Glasgow. I’ve been living in Edinburgh for more than half my life now.

Halves are everywhere: I’m half of Blind Roads Press with Murdo Eason of From Hill to Sea and half of Seacliff Press with author and poet Mark Valentine.

For several years, I ran the Edinburgh Drift project, the component parts of which are now incorporated into this site. Here’s how I originally—and somewhat hyperbolically!—described it:

Edinburgh Drift is an attempt to distill my thoughts and feelings about Edinburgh and the surrounding area; to create a poetry of the commonplace and of the common place; and, in doing so, to draw out the uncommon, the hidden, the forgotten, the numinous.

I’m hoping to find—and to bring out in the writing, photographs and field recordings here—an overlay of the dream on our mundane geographies. This is my own Debordian Théorie de la dérêve—a theory of the driftdream: not sleep-walking, but oneiric-walking, as awake as is necessary to see beyond the curtain.

Although I originally hale from the opposite side of the country, Edinburgh has been my home for more than 25 years. I’m still uncovering its secrets even now.

My writing and wandering along these lines continues, but under my own name; it’s been harder and harder to separate myself into the different aspects, so why keep trying? It’s all me anyway.

I’ve also been recording experimental music since 1990, incorporating acoustic and electric instruments, electronics, layers of textural sound, field recordings and other things which interest me. Over the years, my work has become less abrasive, and more expansive in scope and duration. I particularly love quiet music and my own recordings have become quieter and more minimalistic.

Between 2000 and 2003 I curated the techNOH online label, one of the first of its kind, with over 30 releases of cutting-edge experimental electronic music available for free download. I ran the Dust, Unsettled label from 2006 until 2016, releasing my own work and that of others. In addition to my solo work, I’ve worked with a number of others over the last 30 years. Caroline McKenzie and I operated for many years as Inversion, an electronic call-it-what-you-will duo, which recorded excessively but sadly released very little. A multi-disc retrospective (The Inversion Tapes) has been at the planning stages for some time. One day we’ll complete it… I worked with Caroline and Andrew Paine in the trio Space Weather. Two albums of cosmic explorations were released, as well as a little EP. I was also part of the duo Fougou with Matthew Shaw. Last, but certainly not least, I worked with Richard Youngs on the Radios series, a ten album run of conceptual releases, each focused on a particular set of sound sources, processes and the notion of chiasmus. Eight of these have been released so far; with the ninth recorded and in the vaults…

You can find me on Mastodon and Twitter too.