About

I've been a music nerd for as long as I can remember: my mother's radio and my father's vinyl saw to that. The kind of nerd who won't stay in one genre, who follows curiosity rather than what's fashionable. And the resulting journey has been circuitous: marching bands, teenage-angst-fuelled rock, dusty jazz clubs and, eventually, contemporary composition. Meanwhile, drum practice led to programming, Italy led to Aotearoa, and a summer with Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise led to an obsession I'm still untangling.

I'd always kept "classical music" at a safe distance, too bound up with baroque wigs and concert hall reverence for my taste. What Ross revealed was something else entirely: an entire century of composers dismantling those very conventions, exploring sonorities I'd only glimpsed at the edges of jazz. Suddenly there was a map to territories I didn't know existed, and I've been wandering them ever since, losing count of the rabbit holes I got lost in.

Somewhere between hitting percussion and engineering software, the urge to compose arrived uninvited. I surrendered the only way I know: with a systematic appetite for structure (the software engineer) and a genuine weakness for the moment when that structure cracks open and becomes something else (the drummer, probably). My pieces tend to begin with architecture: grids, patterns, formal constraints. What I'm after is the point where those systems start breathing on their own, where the scaffolding recedes and something organic takes over.

The impostor syndrome still shows up uninvited, but a sabbatical from the day job, a few years of mentoring, and the slow accumulation of collaboration with fellow composers have taught me that the peculiar route I've taken isn't a liability. Crossing borders (between countries, between disciplines, between influences that refuse to stay in their designated boxes) turns out to be the entire point.