tags_ influences

Something Ending

The story of a song from A MILLION TINY GLITCHES   A Million Tiny Glitches by Sleepdogs   When my brother Mike died in 2012 he did so in a dramatic way very much out of keeping with his calm and unflappable personality. An astoundingly rare condition took him away in the blink of an… Read more »

Arc Of Noise #2

How being a musician affects scriptwriting and storytelling – The second in a series of short (ish) articles – WARNING: contains autobiography –   2. Craft work I’ve been thinking about a gig I went to with some friends, and the support act was your classic modular synth guy: sat on the floor, in front… Read more »

Arc Of Noise #1

How being a musician affects scriptwriting and storytelling – The first in a series of short (OK, short-ish) articles –   1. Story ghosts One of the amazing things about making digital music – especially working with laptops and sample libraries – is that you can follow a chain of thought that would have taken… Read more »

26 Years of Babel’s Cupid

So my play Babel’s Cupid has just been announced as one of the three runners-up for the Yale Drama Series Prize 2021. Over the moon, me. Many thanks to judge Paula Vogel and Yale Drama Series, and huge congratulations to the winner Rachel Lynnet, as well as my fellow runners-up Molly Bicks and Francisco Mendoza…. Read more »

Breaking theatre is more fun than making theatre

The peeps at the Watershed Pervasive Media Studio invited me to do a lunchtime talk for them over summer. I’ve been banging on forever about how the theatre industry (and wider arts/creative worlds tbh) would be much more open and connecting if we were better at welcoming, recognising and getting excited by diverse artistic identities,… Read more »

Chipping at the hard stuff: honesty / (in)visibility / community / career

Last Saturday, I spent the day with our brilliant friend and collaborator Sharon Clark, and wor Tim, in the Residence space, for a day of peer mentoring / problem solving / critical reflection. I’ve done a lot of one-to-one peer mentoring, which is super useful, but I loved how this three-pointed process seemed to open… Read more »

2: Interviews

Here’s two interviews with me talking about making stuff and all that. The questions were from students at Bath Spa University. 1. Interview by Connor Sullivan on sound design and site-specific theatre. – What Site-Specific Theatre Productions have you worked on?   Quite a few, but in recent years: – ‘Salt In The Sugar Jar’, a… Read more »

Review: Now Is The Time To Say Nothing

Now Is The Time To Say Nothing By Caroline Williams and Reem Karssli At Arnolfini, Mayfest 2018   Walking out into the May sunshine after seeing Now Is The Time To Say Nothing, I knew I was going to be thinking about it for as long as I had the faculty to, that every now… Read more »

Ocean confessions

It’s late in Week 4 of our Sura Medura residency. If last week was all about beats, tunes and noise; then this week’s been all about orchestral composing, performance text and the sea. Also a whole bunch of getting tangled up with wires, battery packs, live relay, headphone variants and playback devices in order to… Read more »

Drama: problems

Over the next few months I’m about to start working as a dramaturg and writer alongside some great artists, as well as giving a few talks and workshops about sound design for performance. When describing my methods I sometimes use phrases that are shortcuts to wider thinking, to ideas I’ve developed or adopted over the years about… Read more »