Running something like this Substack-newsletter-thing is a new frontier for me—the main aim, for now, is to write in an accessible forum about my own creative practice.
About me
Depending on who’s asking, I either tell people that I’m a musician or a researcher. Technically I do both, but sometimes it takes a while to show how they go together.
On the music side, I grew up in rural Australia playing in metal in garage bands, and then when I left school I moved to the city and spent a few years at university studying jazz. Right now I do most of my public music work with Jo Davie.
Going from country-metal-head to city-jazz-guy was a pretty weird transition, and somewhere along the way I got to wondering about how music even functions as something one can get a degree in at university. I got interested enough in that to do a PhD, and spent a few years going deep on art and education.
I’m lucky in that I get to inhabit both of these worlds—I get to be ‘in’ the art stuff, and I get to think, read, and write about it too. Traditionally, though, it can take a while for musicians and researchers to publish what they make (sometimes years), and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff that comes up along the way. The point of this Substack-newsletter-thing is to find a way to put more of that out there.
What is Substack?
If you want to know more about Substack and how it all works, you can read about that here. Right now, most of what I post is free, but if you get some benefit or enjoyment from this work please do consider the paid option. Paid subscriptions are a privilege, because it means you trust me to do something valuable with my time. Thanks for taking a moment out of your day here, and I'll look forward, I hope, to seeing you in the mailing list.
