Q & A. ALBUMS TYPICAL OF MY STYLE?

For anyone who may not know your music, bearing in mind how much you have released, what albums would you choose to say to someone that this is typical of your styles, and why?

It's always difficult, and undoubtedly presumptuous, to try to define one's musical style. In general, it's up to the listeners to do that, perhaps in the form of album reviews. If I had to venture an answer, I would say that there are a few common features throughout my work. First, I like fairly vast, reverberant sound spaces, with the sound moving across the stereo field and additional effects such as certain delays. Creating space and depth for my music is usually the first step in my composition process. Second, I like fairly contrasting sound palettes, with an experimental component, whether it's pure synthesis or sampled instrument libraries. Added to this is the primacy of climates and textures, which I prefer to more conventional compositional patterns, such as the sequence-polyphony-lead format. 

This primacy of moods and climates leads to a somewhat abstract and experimental dimension that can sometimes veer toward atonality or controlled dissonance, or, conversely, toward a refined and atmospheric minimalism. For the past two years, I have also been moving towards hybrid forms of music, combining purely electronic sounds with acoustic instrument sounds from sampled orchestral libraries. I am not trying to create the illusion of classical instrumentalists, nor am I moving in the direction of “classical” cinematic music based on orchestrations of strings, brass, woodwinds, and percussion.  Other composers do this very well, and I don't have the skills to go down that path. But I find it fascinating to be able to integrate certain acoustic instrument tracks into electronic environments and process them with different effects to create original textures and sound colors. As a lifelong lover of classical music, and contemporary music in particular, I find it fascinating to use these instrument banks in an experimental, non-realistic way.

On my blog, I have tried to offer my listeners some guidance to help them find their way around my music. There are four main categories: space music, post-Eno-style ambient, and abstract-experimental. These are not rigid categories, but musical directions that can overlap. For me, it's a way of gaining some perspective on my musical production over time. 

So if I had to choose a few representative albums, let's see... For Brian Eno-style ambient soundscapes: Ambient Mapping II, Music for Sound Installation I and II, Par vents et marées (album in collaboration with Andrew Heath). For atmospheric classical... Apeiron, Music for Slow Motion Dance... For space music: Cassiopeia, Orpheus, Close Encounter... 

 

For more abstract ambient: Sphaera Armillaris, Music for Art Gallery I, Sound Painting I and II. But I really think that each of my albums weaves these different threads together, in different proportions.

 

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi.