I work with people over a period of time, developing a mutual connection and interest in exploring our experiences of places, spaces or people. This inspires audio narrative, music and sound design resulting in films, audio pieces, Podcasts and installations.

Over time I make audio recordings of our conversations. Working with the lived experiences of the individual first informs how the work then explores larger institutional, social or political structures.

Each individual’s voice has a unique timbre and tempo. To create the music in my film ‘Casual Terms’ Tommy Chavannes and I built music in response to the timbre and speech rhythm of each narrator’s voice.

We also layered recordings made around the workhouse (stones breaking, doors closing, footsteps in corridors) and processed these sounds into musical elements.

We edited these musical elements into but around the voice recordings, giving the voices the main melodic platform.

This subverted the historic rule at the workhouse that inmates could not speak without permission and had to undertake menial tasks like breaking rocks in silence.

The music that emerges from working with audio inspires visuals. When creating the audio narrative for my film Manoeuvres, I became interested in the musical genres that brought background beats to car-meet and car modification subcultures.

I used music to break into the narrative in a way that mirrors counter-culture and underground activity. I downloaded the music from an online platform that describes itself as an audio resource and musicians’ community.

This attitude towards free sharing of samples and collaborative movement of material is redolent of the free party culture the music (and film) pays homage to.

The music and DIY, free-party ethos also inspired graphics that collage and subvert car adverts and car meet footage and animates them like Video Jockey footage. I collaborated with Tommy Chavannes to create these visual elements.