Select compositions

I admire people who approach piano music with clarity of purpose. Examples include Hermione Johnson, James Blake, Nina Simone, Frederic Rzewski, Gordon Monahan and Annea Lockwood. I am intimidated by the instrument for its history, ubiquity, suggestion of virtuosity, size, cost, and all the cultural associations we have with it. I haven't really managed to use it in my pop music or art music, and only a little bit in functional music for theatre, dance and film. There, there has always been a degree of pastiche, of pointing at rather than doing piano music.

Typing is a composition study. It is my first earnest shot at trying to figure out what I want to do with this instrument. I wrote most of it in 2021, and conceived of the last section, but it took me until 2024 to commit to the ideas, and I completed it that year while Composer-in-Residence at Lilburn House.

The piece is built on the rudimentary observation that some keys are black and others white. So most of the time, one type of key is played by one hand, the other by the other. In 3 sections, Typing starts with some textures that this observation makes obvious; then a slower moment explores some wider, dreamier types of harmonies, before the highly rhythmic ending section. The textural and rhythmic sections take the attitude that the physical interaction between instrument and player is the primary concern, the sound is secondary, a (carefully considered) by-product of the physical.

Typing is about categorising. The colours categorise the keys while the sections categorise the musical concepts they use to study the piano. It also refers to that other type of keyboard, the typing type. I think of the black ink on the white paper, the clickety-clack, the preference for speed, and also of the cranky, unfocussed energy I feel when I sit down to type.

With thanks to Performance Arcade, Noel Meek and I were able to commission five new walking scores for performance in February 2024: Louie Zalk-Neale (Ngāi Te Rangi, Pākehā), Sonya Lacey, Rob Thorne (Ngāti Tumutumu), and John Vea, as well as our own.

There is a rich history of art and artists where the walking is central to the work — Richard Long, Francis Alÿs, Hildegard Westerkamp, Richard Wentworth, Janet Cardiff... My performance practice often takes me walking, and often features the execution of tasks, and heading outdoors. Noel's virtually always does these days. We wanted to examine the loose form of walking scores, and what it looks like in Aotearoa in 2024.

In January 2023, the Moth Quartet enjoyed a creative retreat in the Tongariro area. The days were packed with adventures, walking with our instruments through the varied and precious landscape, improvising for, with, and in the natural features. By night, in a darkened yurt, in a gentle delirium, we improvised for microphones, something we could share later, and this album is the result.

At my request, musician and programmer Henry Nicholson developed an

While working on 2019's Fish in Pink Gelatine, I started thinking of the foregrounded musical element as a 'fish', and the accompanimental texture, the medium it moves through, as a 'water. Both shō and guitar have historic use as chord instruments—accompaniment instruments; 'waters' to me—and Between Waters is built on the two performers passing triads back and forth. Traditionally, the shō is tuned to A430, and keeping the guitar at A440 lets the harmony drift down in steps of about a quarter-tone.

Between Waters joins several other commissions by Dylan Lardelli in a growing body of music by NZ composers for performance by Japanese musicians.

Co-created through casual and philosophical conversation, interrogatory devising methods, and rigorous, detailed composition, Sit, Sit explores concepts of distance and communication, stasis and anchor—the distance between. The performance involves speech & song, movement & dance, gesture & theatre, and props & instrumentality. Comprised of various attempts to bridge a distance—the physical effort of sound, the impracticality of moving between distal points, imperfect options for digital mediation—the intention is: between us is a horizon, and this is the music of that horizon.

We created Sit, Sit to perform in the eponymous 2022 tour of Aotearoa.

Futures Past takes three pieces of speculative fiction that were set in the near future when published, but where those futures have now passed. Each fiction gives two dates: when it was published and when it was set. The number 1 song of the time puts music to those pairs of dates, and these make the materials for the first three sections (1. Blade Runner [Ebony And Ivory and Old Town Road]; 2. “On Thursday We Leave For Home" (Twilight Zone episode) [I Will Follow Him and (Everything I Do) I Do It For You]; and 3. 1984 [(Ghost) Riders In The Sky: A Cowboy Legend and Time After Time]). Where does one nostalgia end and another begin?

For each of these sections, one of the players presses record on their cassette player. They are placed in a fish tank and played back simultaneously in the last section.

4. Future’s Passed is a dissolution of time, a mess of nested worlds, a soft apocalypse. Inevitable—the archetypical dystopias promised deliquesce into the fuzz of fictional endtimes.

These things are never tidy.

First Buzzard at the Body project page

Buzzard is a setlist of poetic texts subjected to transformative compositional processes, gutting them of meaning or stumbling through the banal into the sublime. The raw material of the poems is musicalised through cassette loops and digital looper, song, screen, instrumental use of microphones, and a dynamic, embodied delivery.

Stylistically, the show draws on 70’s sound poetry like Canada’s Four Horsemen, 60’s minimalist composition such as Steve Reich’s phase pieces, the immediacy of punk and stand-up comedy, and the sprawling romance of the natural soundscape.

Written soon after my mother's death, this is a sort of improvised violin concerto in three sections, where the violin is the 'thread' that stitches it all together.

My mother made art quilts, and 1. Monochromia with Gash is a musicalisation of one of her moves. She would finish a monochromatic quilt then slice it through, and insert a tract of another quilt. In 2. Billboard Melting, chords come in pairs, the second emerging from the first. The chord pairs are the first and last chord of songs that were #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 at significant moments in her life. Long Far Distance is a spatialised feedback network. The ensemble join a group call on speakerphone, and Tristan (also on the call) feeds the system phrases which echo and distort & chaotic, generational memories that never quite reach silence.

A performed 'this day in history' report for 4 May. The piece addresses these events:
• 1878: Thomas Edison first presents his phonograph. First recorded audio: Edison yelling Mary Had a Little Lamb
• 1916: Executions of Easter Rising rebel leaders Willie Pearse, Ned Daly, Joseph Plunkett, and Michael O'Hanrahan
• 1959: First Grammy Awards. Current Billboard #1: The Fleetwoods, Come Softly To Me
• 2012: Death by cancer of MCA (Adam Yauch). Current #1s: fun. ft. Janelle Monae, We Are Young and Gotye ft. Kimbra, Somebody I Used To Know
• 2004: Death by suicide of David Reimer, case study and protester or gender mis-assignment. Current #1s: Usher ft. Lil Jon, Ludacris, Yeah!

Fish in Pink Gelatine project page

Fish in Pink Gelatine is a show consisting of a set of performed installations and a 50-minute staged concert

The composition focusses on visuality, physicality, spatiality, and instrumental materiality. The sound that emerges seems almost like a byproduct of these other modalities.

The show features these compositions, which can also stand alone as concert pieces:

The text for Amputee Wannabe is taken from The Body Has a Mind of Its Own by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee. It is a section of a chapter discussing the under-researched condition in which a person does not recognise a part of their body as part of their body, rather, they experience it as an alien arm or leg troublingly attached to them. The limb gives no physical pain or discomfort and is fully functional, but is not incorporated into the 'body map'. As such, there is a strong desire to have the offending appendage removed. Amputee Wannabes have been known to take extreme measures to either attempt the amputation themselves, or mangle the body part so thoroughly that a surgeon will agree to the procedure. They know very specifically where their body ends and the foreign limb begins—amputate an inch too much and they will feel that inch missing, an inch too little and they will still be perturbed by an inch of alien flesh permanently attached to their actual body.

This composition amputates the sound of the text from the source. I recorded myself reading three excerpts from the chapter, and chose one (a hypothetical conversation with an amputee wannabe) to derive the open quartet's material. The conducted and mouthed sections are a fairly literal transcription of the rhythms of my reading, and the instrumental sections are these same rhythms slowed down with a melodic exaggeration of the recorded prosody. Reconstructed, Amputee Wannabe could be a song. But as it is, though the words permeate the performed parts, they are only heard right at the end as a recording. Alongside the recorded part the quartet uncomfortably repeats the six chords previously heard as the ends of phrases, now separated, with marked cutoffs.

Looking at old maps of the Vancouver area, you can find a lot of water ways that are now paved over. Some cause problems for the sections of city that are now built there, and some can still be heard if you place your ear to the ground. This piece is about memory and the impact a history—even a forgotten one—has on a place. We can try to forget, and Vancouver seems to try especially hard, but progress without ghosts is an impossibility.

Structurally, Here, We Forget Faster is in four sections, the tempo decreasing for each, and the depth increasing

The piece begins with the tape operator pressing REC. Then the orchestra launches into a busy 'quilt' of musical activity, fragmentary 'patches' of textures and materials brought together in a flurry of ideas, lasting about 3 minutes. Many patches were miniature graphic scores created by Martin Reisle or myself, and realised as notated material by the other. Other patches could be a harmony, a rhythm, an instrumental texture. There is a ritornello with instruments repeating notes at different speeds. The section ends with the tape operator crushing egg shells near the recording microphones before pressing STOP.

The next section is a short, tonal interlude as tape is rewound and reset.

In the third section, the tape is played back at 1/2 speed. The patches of the quilt start to reveal the depth of music that went be too fast to understand previously. The live orchestra play too, responding, embellishing, commenting, the conductor working hard to make sense of the tape part.

The last section continues this, but with playback at 1/4 speed. Patches are barely recognisable, each appearing as a whole new, viscous music. The conductor is still tasked with recognising where in the composition the tape is, and placing the orchestra's spare comments on this murky foundation.

My friend Charlie called Haunt... a piece of “audacious design”. The phrase describes the physical positioning in the space, the clear separation into three musics and the relationships between them, and the form of the piece in time.

Visually, Haunt is a cello solo, with glimpses of the other two elements from some seats. Only the cello player is on stage. Off stage on one side is the ‘quartet of high instruments’, and the drummer on the other. They stay this way until the quartet move into further away at the end, disappearing beyond the harsh horizon of the snare.

The cellist, quartet and drummer are separate musical elements, seemingly sharing no material. Though carefully placed, the elements essentially ignore each other.

The first minute and a half is a set of chords from the quartet. These chords are the only material the quartet play, a limited harmonic vocabulary—a chorale which essentially just repeats. When the cellist does start playing, their vocabulary is timbral and textural. The left hand is always gliding (opposing the stasis of the quartet’s chorale), the right hand eliciting a gradation of grits from humming through trilling to grinding. At first these two elements operate one at a time, they are soon heard simultaneously, toying with which music of the background to the others foreground.

The snare is really just used as a white noise generator, on or off; the drummer plays twice. First, an interruption that bisects the piece. It is sudden, like an electric shock or waking with a frightened start. Though audacious, the other elements seem unaffected, but this is the crack in the piece where cellist’s music falls into loops, and the loops of the quartet’s become dispassionate, mechanical. The drummer plays again for the last minute and a half, a sonic obstruction that subsumes the quartet and outlasts the cellist.

The title elicits revenge, endless repetition, coldness, starkness, and the effects of the in- (or barely-) visible.