Between 2021 and 2023, I was a member of Indie/Electronic band Malady.

Live

Malady supported Sam Akpro, Swim Deep and Wet Leg, among others. We also played live shows at Fabric, SGW3, and more. I played drums/electronics, and (w/ Charlie Clark) provided musical direction for the band's live show.

Studio

In 2022, Malady released 'Round the Bend' on Nice Swan (English Teacher, Jelly Cleaver, Prima Queen). The single recieved a remix from Manchester legends 808 State.

In early 2023, with support from Modern Sky. Malady released 'All Pressure No Diamonds'. The EP was written and recorded together, first at Charlie's flat in East London, and then with Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, Black Country New Road).

Press

The band often recieved press from outlets such as NME and DIY Mag. We also participated in ad campaigns with Fred Perry, Shure and Percival menswear.

Leaving

In 2023, I decided to leave the band in order to focus on research and my own musical practice. The band in its current iteration constists of Charlie, Percy, Khaleem and a drum machine.

Archive

Asimov’s Thiotimoline is a fictional metal which is ‘endochronic’ – it sublimates BEFORE contact with water, having molecular bonds in the past, present and future. This reminded me of my own practice of mindfulness as someone with ADHD. The meditation bowl/bell is a locus of that activity, and so with this piece, I tried to reimagine the activity with a bowl made of this fictional, busy material.

The techniques used in this piece were chosen to intentionally contrive typical spatio-temporal relations. This is mirrored in the arrangement as – although the piece is designed as a perfect loop – the beginning of the piece is granular and an extremely unnatural replica of the ending water texture (a digital impersonation of itself). However, this is done in such a manner that it can only be detected as such due to its juxtaposition with the water playback at the end of the piece. Not only does this arrangement choice serve to disrupt the temporal linearity of cognition of the piece, but it echoes the supposed futility felt when my short-lived, mindfulness-induced reprieve is confronted with a return to the neurotypical, concrete world.

Process:

Source Materials

1. Wok in water
2. A tree and its birds in the shadow of the Basilica,
3. The road from the practice rooms at the Lyon conservatoire
4. Gare de Nord and Gare de Lyon train stations

Making Metals

I used Max/MSP to create sounds of a metal which has bonds to other temporal locations

1. Spectral scrubbing on wok sounds – this is essentially a 2-axis particle simulation, whereby the y axis corresponds to some spectral filtering, and the x to granular synthesis. I used ‘emit’ in Max for Live to achieve this.
2. I also cross-modulated the sounds with different time periods of themselves, I hoped to aesthetically introduce the otherworldly, implied properties of Thiotomoline. On the other hand, by utilising decay on my resonant filter with real-world feedback, I hoped to root such an element in a space. Even though the superimposed, cross-modulated sound interacts with itself endochronically, the ‘real-world’ listener still perceives it as being here. This is because its sounds bounce off walls and into our eardrums just as anything else would.
3. I used a scale-quantised resonance filter locked to large interval jumps in order to modulate field recordings. With 20 mc.poly-based copies of itself, I used this to simulate sounds of pitched rain on metal.
4. I used bird recordings to frequency modulate train sounds. I leveraged just intonation and inharmonicity to imply metal overtones
5. I took a short recording of running water and indefinitely reproduced it with granular synthesis

In 2020, I very quietly released a few loosies from an old USB collection. Songs and sounds I made between 2018-2020.

A rise of machine¹ listening algorithms in everyday interactions has impacted not only how we interact with technology, but how we interact with each other. For an example close to home: try retaining your patois/accent when your smart speaker – the nearest thing to a cohabitant or even a carer – won’t let you order food with it. This series of works, still in progress ², explores how we distort our communications so as to construct and relate to digital models of self. What are the social artifacts which arise from contorting ourselves to meet the gaze of the machine?