Look How Brightly is presented as your debut album, bringing together works from the last decade. What made you feel this was the right moment to release it?

Releasing Look How Brightly gathers multiple threads that have been running through my work over the last decade. Only in hindsight have I been able to step back and recognise these patterns: a coherent body of music that returns to recurring questions about what it means to be human, the good, the bad and the ugly, approached from different perspectives, but with shared musical preoccupations: unison and fracture.

The album marks a moment of reflection, drawing a line under this extended period of exploration, while also offering the work for others to encounter and respond to in their own way.

At the same time, my practice has been evolving. I have increasingly found myself working across disciplines and collaborating more with visual artists, and my musical language is moving in new directions. This album feels like the close of one chapter and a way of opening into whatever comes next.

The album unfolds as a multidisciplinary exhibition, co-curated with Jenn Ellis at Hypha Gallery South Bank, placing the music in dialogue with other artworks and sensibilities. What interests you about that “expanded” form?

Bringing different forms together is not an addition so much as a return to something natural. We do not experience the world in neatly separated disciplines. We encounter it as something layered, sensory, and interconnected.

Presenting the music within an expanded, interdisciplinary context allows it to resonate differently. It becomes less of a fixed object and more of a catalyst, something that opens outwards and prompts new associations, questions, and ways of seeing. In dialogue with visual work, space, and curation, the music can extend beyond itself.

That sense of openness and permeability is important to me. It reflects a broader curiosity about how we perceive and interpret the world, and how art can create spaces that are exploratory rather than closed. 

Your work draws on a wide cartography of references, from mythology and philosophy to astronomy and spiritual texts. What can your music express about the human condition, fracture, grief, or transcendence?

I think it was Aristotle who said music has a unique access or influence over the soul. I do not think you need to be a philosopher to get on board with that idea. Music, as a temporal and often abstract art form, essentially consisting of sounds, frequencies, air vibrating, affects our body and emotions in ways that we are still trying to understand. But we do not necessarily need to understand them, we just need to feel them.

For me, that is where its power lies. Music can help us articulate feelings that we cannot put into words or explain in other ways. It can take us on a journey like no other art form can. It is present at the most meaningful rituals in our lives, absorbing and carrying emotional weight in a way that feels both deeply personal and shared.

I was reminded of this early in my career, after the premiere of my first professional work, Dirges for the Living, which appears on the album. After the premiere, a woman came up to me and thanked me for the piece. And then she said something which changed my life: “Last year my husband tragically died in a car accident and your music articulated emotions that I haven’t been able to put into words since that day.”

This amazing stranger gave me an incredible gift. The confirmation that music can help us feel and move through difficult and challenging parts of life, and more specifically, that music I write could help people do this. I feel incredibly lucky that she gave me that gift that day.

You have built lasting artistic relationships with Jenn Ellis and Dawn Ng, whose work also accompanies the album’s visual universe. What does sustained collaboration bring to you and the work?

I have always believed deeply in the value of collaboration. It is fundamental to how I think about art and its capacity to expand us.

Sustained collaboration builds a kind of shared language and trust. It allows ideas to develop more fully, and often to move beyond what any one person might have imagined alone. These relationships challenge and extend my thinking. They open up new possibilities, new directions, and new ways of realising a vision.

For me, that exchange is one of the most meaningful parts of being an artist. It is not just about making work together, but about growing alongside one another, and allowing that ongoing dialogue to shape what the work can become and, in turn, who we become as artists and as people. It is so richly rewarding to be on that journey with Jenn, Dawn, and other dear friends and collaborators.

Thanks Alex!